LIBRARY    1 

UNIVE    SITY  OF 
CALfO  :;nia 

SAN  DiEGO 

, J 


fi— iin2 


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SOME   INFLUENCES    IN   MODERN 
PHILOSOPHIC   THOUGHT 


Some  Influences  in  Modern 
Philosophic  Thought/ 


Being  the  fifth  series  of  Johk  Calvin  McNair 

Lectures  before  the  University  of  North 

Carolina,  delivered  at  Chapel  Hill, 

April  19,  20  and  21,  1912 


By        r^ 

ARTHUR  TWINING  HADLEY 

President  of  Yale  University 


NEW  HAVEN:  YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

LONDON:     HENRY     FROWDE 

OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

MCMXIII 


Copyright,  1913 

BY 

Yale  University  Press 


First  printed  May,  1913,  1000  copies 


PREFACE 

By  the  will  of  the  late  John  Calvin 
McNair  a  course  of  lectures  was  estab- 
lished at  the  University  of  North  Caro- 
lina whose  object  should  be  to  show  the 
mutual  bearing  of  science  and  theology 
upon  each  other.  It  was  my  privilege 
to  serve  as  McNair  Lecturer  in  the  year 
1912, 

I  have  published  the  lectures  substan- 
tially as  they  were  delivered;  but  I  have 
divided  what  was  originally  the  first  lec- 
ture into  two  separate  chapters.  I  have 
taken  the  liberty  of  adding,  as  an  Appen- 
dix, a  brief  discussion  of  the  meaning  of 
the  term  Philosophy,  which  has  not  been 
hitherto  published,  and  an  estimate  of  the 
influence  of  Darwin  upon  historical  and 
political  thought,  reprinted  from  the  Psy- 
chological Review  for  May,  1909. 


PREFACE 

No  one  can  expect  to  find  an  exhaustive 
treatment  of  so  large  a  topic  in  so  small  a 
space;  but  I  venture  to  hope  that  some 
may  be  helped  in  their  reading  and  in  their 
thinking  by  the  suggestions  which  the  book 
contains. 

I  am  glad  to  take  this  opportunity  to 
express  my  great  indebtedness  to  the  fac- 
ulty and  students  of  the  University  of 
North  Carolina  for  the  courtesy  which  I 
enjoyed  during  my  stay  at  Chapel  Hill. 

A.  T.  H. 

Yale  University, 
December,  19 12. 


VI 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.     General  Purpose  of  the  Course  .         .  1 

II.     Changed  Conceptions  of  Science         .  12 

III.  New  Views  of  Politics  and  of  Ethics  40 

IV.  The  Spiritual  Basis  of  Recent  Poetry  77 
Appendix     I.     On    the     Meaning    of     the 

term  Philosophy  .  ,  .113 

Appendix  II.  The  Influence  of  Charles 
Darwin  on  Historical  and  Political 
Science     .  .  .  .  .121 


Vll 


GENERAL  PURPOSE  OF  THE  COURSE 

A  SEARCHING  test  of  what  educa- 
-^  ^-  tion  has  done  for  a  man  is  given  by 
the  question:  "Has  he  gained  a  sense  of 
the  real  and  permanent  values  of  the  differ- 
ent parts  of  life,  as  distinct  from  their 
apparent  magnitude  at  the  moment?" 

This  sense  is  not  common,  nor  easily 
acquired.  Most  men  judge  the  size  of 
things  by  their  nearness  or  remoteness. 
A  single  maple  tree  in  the  foreground 
blots  out  a  hundred  miles  of  distant  land- 
scape from  their  minds  as  well  as  their 
eyes.  The  man  who  is  occupied  with  the 
pursuit  of  money  or  political  office  or 
scientific  research  tends  to  think  everything 
small  which  does  not  visibly  contribute  to 

money-getting,    or    political    influence,    or 

1 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

scientific  discovery.  There  is  much  in  the 
current  teaching  of  the  day  which  tends 
to  increase  this  danger.  We  are  prone  to 
disparage  philosophic  methods  of  study  as 
compared  with  practical  ones;  to  urge  the 
student  to  develop  his  special  interests  and 
capacities  rather  than  to  widen  his  intel- 
lectual horizon;  to  count  the  man  as  best 
educated  who  can  best  do  his  own  small 
fraction  of  the  world's  work. 

With  this  view  I  have  little  sympathy. 
He  who  Is  content  to  be  a  specialist  and 
nothing  more,  however  long  and  well  he 
may  have  been  trained,  cannot  properly 
be  said  to  have  been  educated.  This  term 
is  by  rights  reserved  for  him  who  has 
acquired  a  broad  outlook  on  life  as  a 
whole;  who  has  worked  out  ideas  of  his 
own  as  to  the  relation  between  our  own 
selves,  the  visible  universe  about  us,  and 
the  Invisible  principle  that  rules  it.  Ideas 
of  his  own,  I  say.    A  man  cannot  take  his 

2 


GENERAL  PURPOSE 

philosophy  at  second  hand,  as  a  set  of 
ready-made  principles  based  on  the  study 
and  experience  of  others.  If  he  tries  to  do 
this  he  gets  a  creed,  not  a  philosophy. 
"What  you  have  inherited  from  your 
fathers,"  says  Goethe,  "you  must  earn  for 
yourself  before  you  can  call  it  yours." 

You  will  find  plenty  of  people  inside  the 
churches  and  outside  of  them  who  are 
anxious  to  impose  their  philosophy  upon 
you  and  your  fellow  men  in  the  form  of  a 
creed.  But  the  tendency  of  all  such  creeds 
is  to  become  mere  formulas.  No  creed  or 
philosophy  when  thus  imposed  from  out- 
side is  of  much  use  to  a  growing  man  or  a 
growing  society  in  solving  the  problems 
which  each  change  of  circumstances  neces- 
sarily brings.  In  order  to  be  able  to  do 
this  men  must  have  brought  the  proposi- 
tions of  their  creed  into  vital  connection 
with  their  own  experience  of  life. 

There  are  two  things  that  a  man  must 

3 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

WOO  and  win  for  himself:  his  bride  and  his 
philosophy.  Mr.  Huxley  is  said  to  have 
expressed  the  wish  that  he  had  some  friend 
whose  judgment  he  could  trust  to  whom  he 
could  delegate  the  work  of  examining  the 
claims  of  the  Christian  church  upon  a 
man's  allegiance.  He  was  anxious  to  know 
what  should  be  his  attitude  toward  that 
institution,  and  he  was  too  busy  with  his 
work  as  a  biologist  to  find  the  time  for 
examination  of  the  evidence.  It  will  be 
remembered  that  Captain  Miles  Standish 
for  somewhat  similar  reasons  actually  dele- 
gated to  his  friend  John  Alden  the  work 
of  getting  him  a  bride,  he  being  too  busy 
with  the  defense  of  the  colony  to  have  time 
for  anything  else.  As  matters  fell  out, 
however.  Miles  Standish  was  compelled  to 
leave  his  bride  to  John  Alden;  and  I 
suspect  that  if  Huxley  had  really  tried 
his  experiment  he  would  have  ended  by 
leaving  his  religion  to  his  friend. 


GENERAL  PURPOSE 

Some  people  acquire  their  philosophic 
views  by  actual  contact  with  life  itself;  by 
meeting  men  of  various  types  and  tem- 
peraments and  thus  learning  to  look  at  the 
world's  problems  from  different  angles  of 
vision.  Others  get  the  same  result  from 
books;  they  study  the  classics  of  literature 
and  history  and  science,  and  find  which 
things  have  proved  large  at  all  times 
instead  of  simply  looking  large  for  the 
moment.  The  college  student  has  an 
opportunity  of  combining  both  these  meth- 
ods; and  I  count  it  one  of  the  greatest 
privileges  of  college  life  to  use  this  oppor- 
tunity. In  after  years  the  man  who  goes 
into  active  business  Is  cut  off  from  contact 
with  the  past;  the  man  who  does  not  go 
into  active  business  is  cut  off  from  contact 
with  the  present.  To  the  college  student 
more  than  to  any  one  else  it  is  given  to 
feel  the  inspiration  of  old  ideas  and  tradi- 
tions and  at  the  same  time  to  discuss  them 

5 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

with  the  men  of  today  and  by  the  methods 
of  today.  This  affords  him  the  oppor- 
tunity for  philosophic  thought  in  the  best 
and  truest  sense. 

I  shall  not  undertake  in  the  brief  com- 
pass of  three  lectures  to  furnish  you  with 
a  ready-made  philosophical  system.  If  I 
did,  and  if  I  succeeded  in  condensing  into 
three  hours  what  might  well  fill  three  hun- 
dred, the  resulting  theories  would  be  mine 
and  not  yours.  All  that  I  can  do  is  to 
indicate  some  of  the  lines  of  thought  in 
science,  in  politics,  and  in  literature,  which 
have  met  the  needs  of  thinking  men  of 
successive  generations  in  the  nineteenth 
century. 

Lines  of  thought,  I  say,  in  the  plural, 
rather  than  line  of  thought,  in  the  singular, 
because  the  nineteenth  century  has  wit- 
nessed the  development  of  a  whole  series 
of  different  philosophies — the  positive 
philosophy  of  our  grandfathers,  the  evo- 

6 


GENERAL  PURPOSE 

lutionary  philosophy  of  our  fathers,  and 
the  so-called  "pragmatist"  philosophy 
which  now  appears  to  have  displaced  them 
both.  We  cannot  speak  of  a  nineteenth 
century  fashion  in  thinking  in  the  same 
way  in  which  we  speak  of  an  eighteenth 
century  fashion  or  a  thirteenth  century 
fashion.  Fashions  in  thinking  have 
changed  nearly  as  fast  as  fashions  in 
dress.  System  has  succeeded  system  with 
bewildering  frequency.  The  idol  of  today 
is  the  antiquarian  curiosity  of  tomorrow. 
In  my  own  student  years  and  in  those  that 
immediately  followed,  philosophic  interest 
centered  about  Herbert  Spencer.  Some- 
times we  agreed  with  him,  sometimes  we 
disagreed  with  him ;  but  whether  we  agreed 
or  disagreed,  we  were  always  intensely 
interested  in  what  he  said.  His  way  of 
looking  at  the  universe  appealed  to  us, 
whether  his  specific  theories  did  so  or  not. 

We  were  quite  ready  to  admit  that  future 

7 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT  , 

generations  might  modify  his  doctrines  or 
might  reject  part  of  what  he  said;  that 
future  generations. should  cease  to  be  inter- 
ested in  his  philosophy  and  should  say,  "It 
may  be  true  or  it  may  not  be  true,  but  it 
is  a  rather  uninteresting  and  useless  kind 
of  thing  either  way,"  never  entered  our 
minds.  Yet  this  is  precisely  what  has  hap- 
pened. The  mode  of  thought  which  he 
represented  has  come  and  gone.  Thirty 
years  ago  it  was  rather  old-fashioned  not 
to  care  for  Herbert  Spencer;  today  it  is 
rather  old-fashioned  to  care  for  him. 

I  shall  not  try  to  expound  Herbert 
Spencer's  philosophy  or  any  of  the  other 
philosophies  of  the  nineteenth  century  in 
detail.  If  you  want  to  know  what  Spencer 
said  you  must  read  Spencer.  If  you  want 
to  know  what  Nietzsche  said  you  must 
read  Nietzsche.  If  you  want  to  know 
what  James  said  you  must  read  James. 
Nor  am  I  undertaking  to  decide  which  of 

8 


GENERAL  PURPOSE 

these  philosophies   is   good   and  which   is 

bad.     Each  philosophy  was  good  so   far 

as  it  met  the  needs  of  its  own  time.     Each 

philosophy  was  bad  so  far  as  it  failed  to 

satisfy  the  wants  of  the  next  generation. 

What  I  wish  to  do  is  to  go  one  step  farther 

back — to  show  the  concrete  causes  which 

led  different  groups  of  students  and  men  of 

affairs  to  be  interested  in  these  successive 

philosophies  one  after  another. 

The  wise  historian  does  not  generally 

attempt  to  decide  which  of  his  characters 

is  noblest  or  which  of  their  constitutional 

theories  is  the  best.      Plutarch  tried  this 

sort  of  thing  now  and  then;  but  even  in 

the   case   of   Plutarch   you   will   find   that 

most  of  his  comparisons  of  good  men  end 

by  saying  that  each  was  good  in  his  own 

way,  and  most  of  his  comparisons  of  bad 

men  end  by  saying  that  each  was  bad  in 

his  own  way.     "Tiberius  had  more  virtues, 

but  Agis  had  fewer  faults" ;  so  the  com- 

9 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

ment  runs,  through  the  whole  Hst.  The 
real  work  of  the  historian  is  not  so  much 
to  pass  judgment  on  his  characters  as  to 
explain  the  relation  between  these  charac- 
ters, good  or  bad,  and  the  state  of  society 
which  brought  them  to  the  front.  He 
makes  his  chronicle  of  facts  in  one  decade 
an  explanation  of  the  men  of  the  next.  I 
am  going  to  try  to  do  a  little  of  the  same 
sort  of  work  for  the  history  of  nineteenth 
century  philosophy.  I  shall  try  to  tell  as 
well  as  I  can  in  so  short  a  space  some  of 
the  things  that  happened  in  the  world  of 
science  and  the  world  of  politics  which 
made  people  crave  a  different  sort  of 
explanation  of  the  universe  at  the  end  of 
the  century  from  that  which  satisfied  most 
of  them  at  the  beginning.  I  hope  by  so 
doing  to  help  some  of  you  to  understand 
more  fully  than  you  have  done  the  real 
significance  of  these  events,  and  to  assist 

you  in  some  slight  degree  in  working  out 

10 


GENERAL  PURPOSE 

your  own  philosophy  of  life  by  setting 
forth  some  facts  which  have  influenced  the 
beliefs  of  thinking  men  of  recent  genera- 
tions. In  the  words  of  one  of  the  wisest 
Frenchmen  of  his  age,  Charles  Dunoyer, 
"/^  n'impose  rien,  je  ne  propose  meme 
rien:  j' expose." 


11 


II 

CHANGED  CONCEPTIONS  OF 
SCIENCE 

'TpHE  period  from  1815  to  1848  lies 
-*-  intellectually  very  far  removed  from 
the  present.  The  science  and  the  litera- 
ture, the  politics  and  the  ethics  of  our 
grandfathers  were  radically  different  from 
our  own.  We  see  the  extent  of  the  change 
when  we  contrast  the  poetry  of  Byron  with 
that  of  Kipling,  the  music  of  Mendelssohn 
with  that  of  Wagner,  the  essays  of  Sydney 
Smith  with  those  of  Chesterton,  or  the 
political  philosophy  of  Malthus  with  that 
of  Morley.  The  age  that  followed  the 
French  Revolution  was  more  remote  from 
the  world  of  today  than  the  age  that  pre- 
ceded it.  Macaulay — a  most  character- 
istic product  of  his  time — is  farther  away 

12 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

from   us   than   Edmund   Burke   or  Adam 
Smith, 

If  we  try  to  find  the  common  element 
in  these  illustrations  I  have  cited,  in  order 
to  construct  for  ourselves  a  picture  of  the 
feelings  and  habits  of  the  time,  the  first 
thing  we  notice  is  a  certain  finality  of  state- 
ment and  utterance.  Lord  Melbourne,  a 
survival  of  an  earlier  period  and  the  head 
of  a  ministry  of  which  Macaulay  was  a 
brilliant  member,  once  said  with  a  sigh  at 
the  close  of  a  cabinet  meeting,  "I  only  wish 
I  were  as  sure  of  anything  as  young  Tom 
Macaulay  is  of  everything."  I  had  in  my 
hands  a  few  months  since  a  manuscript 
notebook  of  the  first  course  of  lectures 
on  chemistry  delivered  by  Professor  Silli- 
man  at  Yale  College  a  century  ago,  after 
his  return  from  a  period  of  study  with  the 
great  European  masters.  He  said  in  sub- 
stance: "Chemistry  is  to  all  intents  and 
purposes    a    finished    science.      Whatever 

13 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

may  be  done  in  the  future,  it  is  impossible 
that  all  ages  to  come,  all  put  together, 
should  ever  make  discoveries  equal  in 
number  and  importance  to  the  things  which 
have  been  found  out  in  the  last  thirty  or 
forty  years."  There  is  a  similar  utter- 
ance in  Mill's  Political  Economy — all 
the  more  significant  because  Mill  him- 
self was  one  of  the  most  modest  of  men 
in  estimating  his  personal  merits  and 
achievements : 

"Happily,  there  is  nothing  in  the  laws 
of  Value  which  remains  for  the  present  or 
any  future  writer  to  clear  up;  the  theory 
of  the  subject  is  complete :  the  only  diffi- 
culty to  be  overcome  is  that  of  so  stating 
it  as  to  solve  by  anticipation  the  chief 
perplexities  which  occur  in  applying  it: 
and  to  do  this,  some  minuteness  of  expo- 
sition, and  considerable  demands  on  the 
patience  of  the  reader,  are  unavoidable." 

This  spirit  of  finality  carried  with  it  a 

14 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

good  deal  of  intolerance.  It  is  doubtful 
whether  there  was  as  much  real  liberty  of 
thought  in  Europe  in  the  first  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century  as  in  the  last  half  of 
the  eighteenth.  Physically,  indeed,  men 
were  freer.  There  was  less  restriction  of 
movement,  less  effort  to  circumscribe  the 
emotions  and  dictate  the  actions  of  the 
people.  But  mentally,  I  suspect  that  men 
were  less  free — at  any  rate  in  the  great 
centers  of  thought.  It  was  harder  rather 
than  easier  to  do  your  thinking  for  your- 
self or  to  defy  any  of  the  manifold  dic- 
tates of  fashion.  The  eighteenth  century 
had  encouraged  individuality  of  mind  and 
of  speech.  It  was  fertile  in  novelties  of 
every  kind.  The  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  discouraged  such  individ- 
uality, whenever  it  seemed  to  threaten 
established  social  usages  and  conventions. 
The  larger  the  man  was,  the  more  chance 

he  had  of  achieving  freedom  in  the  eigh- 

15 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

teenth  century;  the  larger  the  man  was,  the 
less  chance  he  seemed  to  have  of  achieving 
freedom  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth. 
This  was  the  age  which  killed  Keats  and 
ostracized  Shelley;  which  shut  up  writers 
like  Silvio  Pellico  in  prison  and  drove 
philosophic  thinkers  like  Marx  into 
avowed  antagonism  to  the  social  order. 

A  system  of  metaphysics  which  pre- 
vailed in  England  during  that  period  illus- 
trates the  characteristics  of  the  times.  It 
is  called  the  "common  sense"  philosophy. 
You  are  no  longer  to  be  compelled  to 
believe  what  Aristotle  tells  you  because 
Aristotle  said  it.  You  are  no  longer  to  be 
compelled  to  believe  what  the  church  tells 
you  because  the  church  says  it.  You  are 
to  believe  what  common  sense  tells  you  as 
we  see  it — "we"  representing  the  respect- 
able body  of  thinking  men  in  the  nine- 
teenth century.  You  are  at  perfect  liberty 
to  believe  otherwise;  but  if  you  do  "we" 

16 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

shall  perceive  that  you  have  no  sense,  and 
'  we  shall  treat  you  accordingly. 

All  this  was  natural  enough.       In  the 
light    of    the    political    events   which    had 
immediately    preceded,    it    was    not    only 
natural   but  inevitable.      The    ferment   of 
eighteenth    century    thought,    which    had 
produced   a   Rousseau   and   a   Voltaire,   a 
Franklin  and  a  Jefferson,  a  Goethe  and  a 
Napoleon,  had  also  produced  a  revolution 
which  had  shaken  the  social  order  to  its 
foundation  and  involved  Europe  in  a  series 
of  wars  unparalleled  in  their  extent  and 
severity.     The  world  required  rest.     The 
need  of  progress  was  less  conspicuous  than 
the   need   of    order.      The    need    of    free 
thought  was  less  exigent  than  the  need  of 
coherent     thought.       The     statesmen     of 
Europe  were  trying  to  fit  the  broken  pieces 
of  European  politics  back  into  a  monarchi- 
cal scheme.     The  literary  men  of  Europe 
were  trying  to  substitute  skilled  treatment 

17 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

of  safe  themes  for  erratic  treatment  of 
unsafe  ones.  The  period  from  1815  to 
1848  was,  I  think,  an  age  of  happiness  and 
contentment  for  the  majority  of  civilized 
people,  because  the  majority  of  people 
were  pretty  well  satisfied  with  the  amount 
of  liberty  they  themselves  enjoyed,  and  did 
not  mind  very  much  if  this  or  that  man 
were  denied  a  freedom  for  which  they 
themselves  felt  no  immediate  craving. 
But  it  was  not  an  age  of  progress,  nor  an 
age  of  liberty  for  progressively  minded 
men. 

From  this  state  of  intellectual  compla- 
cency the  world  was  gradually  aroused 
by  two  somewhat  independent  sets  of 
events — one  in  science,  which  will  be 
described  in  this  lecture,  another  in  politics, 
which  forms  the  theme  of  the  next. 

The  science  of  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  had  been  of  an  eminently 

18 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

safe  character.  It  was  at  once  correct  and 
commonplace.  People  had  abandoned  the 
wilder  ideas  and  hopes  which  had  animated 
the  investigators  of  earlier  centuries.  They 
no  longer  dabbled  in  the  arts  of  magic 
or  of  prophecy.  They  no  longer  sought 
to  transmute  lead  into  gold,  or  to  find 
the  mysterious  "elixir  of  life."  Alchemy 
had  given  place  to  chemistry,  astrology 
to  astronomy.  Investigators  were  not 
so  much  occupied  with  discovering  prin- 
ciples as  with  ordering  and  arranging 
facts.  The  chemist  had  his  list  of  ele- 
ments, with  the  atomic  weights  which 
determined  the  proportions  in  which  they 
combined;  he  had  ceased  to  speculate  on 
the  nature  of  these  atoms  or  to  investigate 
with  the  interest  that  had  animated  his 
predecessors  the  strange  processes  which 
went  on  when  different  elements  united. 
The  physicist  was  content  to  describe  and 
measure  the  phenomena  of  heat  and  sound 

19 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

and  light  and  electricity;  concerning  the 
essential  causes  of  these  phenomena  he 
was  content  to  accept  what  Newton  or 
Huyghens  or  Franklin  had  suggested.  A 
single  accident  on  the  part  of  Benjamin 
Franklin  in  the  choice  of  material  for  one 
of  his  electrical  experiments  was  sufficient 
to  give  wrong  shape  to  the  whole  form  of 
electric  theory  for  a  century  afterward. 
The  geologist  was  more  occupied  with  the 
description  of  his  rocks  and  with  the  order 
in  which  they  were  probably  deposited 
than  with  any  investigation  into  the  meth- 
ods by  which  they  had  been  produced. 
The  botanist  was  satisfied  to  describe  the 
plants  that  he  saw  and  group  them  into 
classes  according  to  their  obvious  resem- 
blances. If,  like  Linnaeus,  he  contented 
himself  with  arranging  them  according  to 
superficial  or  accidental  resemblances,  the 
classification  was  called  an  artificial  one. 
If,   like   DeCandolle,    he   tried   to   get   at 

20 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

deeper  and  more  essential  characteristics 
as  a  basis  of  his  system,  the  classification 
was  said  to  be  a  natural  one.  But  the 
object  was  the  same  in  the  two  cases.  You 
wanted  to  get  your  plant  ticketed,  so  that 
the  boy  who  counted  its  stamens  or  the 
man  who  dissected  its  pistils  could  know 
where  to  find  it  in  the  last  edition  of  the 
encyclopEedia  if  it  was  a  well-known  spe- 
cies, or  where  to  put  it  in  the  next  edition 
if  it  was  a  newly  discovered  one.  The 
zoologist  had  no  profounder  aim  than  the 
botanist.  Even  the  human  body  was 
studied  in  the  same  purely  descriptive 
spirit.  Our  knowledge  was  anatomical 
rather  than  physiological  or  pathological. 
Medical  students  were  taught  to  describe 
its  parts  with  accuracy;  they  were  not 
taught  with  any  corresponding  degree  of 
success  to  explain  their  development  and 
their  functions.     The  scientific  instinct  of 

that  day  was  an  impulse  to  name  things 

21 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

and  to  identify  them,  rather  than  a  craving 
to  lay  bare  the  hidden  forces  by  which  they 
were  moved.  We  find  this  whole  scheme 
of  classification  systematized  and  glorified 
in  the  positive  philosophy  of  Auguste 
Comte,  where  the  different  branches  of 
knowledge  are  themselves  arranged  in 
order  and  each  science  brought  into  what 
that  philosopher  believed  to  be  a  proper 
relation  to  other  sciences  as  part  of  an 
articulated  whole. 

The  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century 
witnessed  the  development  of  three  great 
discoveries  which  aroused  the  world  from 
this  intellectual  complacency,  changed  the 
character  of  modern  science,  and  embold- 
ened people  to  try  to  explain  things  which 
they  had  previously  been  content  to  de- 
scribe and  arrange.  These  were  the  law 
of  the  conservation  of  energy,  the  theory 
of  cellular  tissue,  and  the  process  of 
elimination  by  natural  selection. 

22 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

The  doctrine  of  the  conservation  of 
energy  was  the  first  of  the  three  to  be  fully 
developed. 

The  physicists  of  a  hundred  years 
ago — or  natural  philosophers,  as  they 
would  then  have  called  themselves — de- 
scribed the  behavior  of  a  number  of  phe- 
nomena like  heat  and  sound  and  light, 
which  they  treated  as  independent  things. 
The  chemists  of  the  same  period  described 
and  classified  separate  elements,  and  ridi- 
culed the  efforts  of  the  earlier  alchemists 
to  find  some  force  which  might  possibly 
transmute  one  element  into  another.  There 
had  been,  indeed,  a  few  brilliant  thinkers, 
like  our  own  fellow  countryman.  Count 
Rumford,  who  had  suggested  that  these 
different  things  might  not  be  so  wholly 
independent  as  they  seemed.  But  such 
men  were  isolated,  and  their  voices  were 
unheard  or  forgotten. 

About    1840    two    physicians,    studying 

23 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

separately,  one  in  Hamburg  and  another 
in  Manchester,  developed  a  theory  that 
heat  was  a  form  of  manifestation  of 
motion;  that  mechanics  and  thermo- 
dynamics, instead  of  being  separate 
sciences,  were  one  and  the  same  science; 
that  the  combustion  of  the  coal  in  the  fur- 
nace and  the  expansion  of  the  steam  in 
the  boiler  represented  simply  the  trans- 
mutations of  energy  from  one  form  into 
another;  and  that  each  unit  of  heat  had 
its  mechanical  equivalent  in  terms  of 
motion.  The  researches  of  Dr.  Mayer 
and  Dr.  Joule  were  carried  further  by  a 
line  of  eminent  observers  and  mathema- 
ticians— Faraday,  Tyndall,  Helmholtz, 
and  a  score  of  others  whose  names 
are  household  words  today.  Sound  and 
light,  as  well  as  heat,  were  found  to  be 
manifestations  of  this  same  transmutable 
energy  in  another  form.  Electrical  phe- 
nomena    were     explained     in     the     same 

24 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

manner.  The  whole  modern  system  of 
electrical  engineering  has  been  based  upon 
mechanical  laws,  more  complex  indeed 
than  those  of  thermodynamics  but  appar- 
ently not  less  sure.  Even  chemical  action 
and  chemical  combination  have  been 
treated  as  being  manifestations  of  energy 
in  still  another  form;  energy  which  is 
stored  up  at  one  time  or  under  one  set  of 
conditions,  and  becomes  "potentially" 
available  to  be  set  free  In  another.  The 
chemist  is  no  longer  content  when  he  has 
weighed  his  substances  or  measured  the 
volumes  of  his  gases;  but  he  strives  with 
ever  increasing  success  to  coordinate  all 
chemical  phenomena  under  a  few  basic 
laws. 

A  somewhat  similar  change  was  wrought 
in  biological  science  by  the  development  of 
the  theory  of  cellular  tissue. 

It  was  not  a  wholly  new  idea  that  living 

bodies  were  composed  of  a  multitude  of 

25 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

small  cells,  each  with  an  independent 
activity  of  its  own.  Caspar  Wolff  in 
Germany  and  Bichat  in  France  had 
enunciated  doctrines  of  this  kind  in  the 
eighteenth  century.  But  it  was  reserved 
for  the  nineteenth  century  to  show  how  the 
study  of  the  behavior  of  these  cells  could 
explain  the  life  history  of  the  plants  and 
animals  in  which  they  were  gathered 
together.  Schwann  at  Berlin,  in  the  years 
from  1834  to  1838,  first  emphasized  the 
possible  importance  of  this  method  of 
explanation.  The  views  of  Schwann  had 
to  be  modified  in  many  essential  respects; 
but  they  formed  a  basis  for  the  theory  of 
cellular  tissue  or  protoplasm  developed  by 
DuBois-Reymond  and  Huxley  and  Vir- 
chow,  which  wrought  a  change  in  the  whole 
underlying  conception  and  purpose  of  the 
biological  sciences  similar  to  that  which 
the  doctrine  of  conservation  of  energy  had 
wrought  in  the  physical  sciences.     These 

26 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

sciences  ceased  to  be  merely  descriptive; 
they  became  in  a  fuller  sense  explanatory. 
They  looked  less  at  the  outside  of  things 
and  more  at  the  inside.  Morphology  gave 
place  to  physiology.  The  museum  counted 
for  less  as  an  instrument  of  the  scientist's 
study,  the  laboratory  for  more.  The  biol- 
ogist was  no  longer  content  to  describe  the 
anatomy  of  plants  and  animals  and  men; 
he  wanted  to  know  their  life  history.  It 
was  not  enough  to  classify  them  by  their 
external  forms  or  to  explain  the  functions 
of  the  different  parts;  he  must  know  how 
they  grow  and  become  strong  or  why  they 
become  weak  and  die.  Our  books  of 
botany  and  zoology  have  become  some- 
thing more  than  well-ordered  indexes  of 
the  different  forms  of  plant  and  animal 
life.  They  occupy  themselves  with  the 
processes  of  fertilization  and  nutrition  and 
differentiation  of  activity  on  the  one  hand, 

or  of  disease  and  death  on  the  other. 

27 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

But  these  two  discoveries,  wide  reaching 
as  they  were,  affected  chiefly  the  thoughts 
and  processes  of  the  professional  student 
of  science.  The  third  great  discovery,  of 
the  principle  of  natural  selection,  wrought 
a  similar  transformation  in  the  thoughts 
of  the  world  as  a  whole. 

People  sometimes  speak  of  natural 
selection  and  evolution  as  though  they 
were  the  same  thing.  This  is  not  true. 
The  idea  of  evolution  is  old.  The  idea 
of  the  establishment  of  types  and  species 
by  natural  selection  is  surprisingly  new. 
The  importance  of  the  process  of  natural 
selection  was  discovered  and  its  methods 
of  operation  were  developed  simulta- 
neously and  to  a  large  extent  independ- 
ently by  Charles  Darwin  and  Alfred 
Russell  Wallace  about  the  middle  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  The  botanist  or 
zoologist  of  a  generation  previous  had 
been  content  to  describe  the  fern  or  the 

28 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

rose,  the  oyster  or  the  rabbit.  The  cell 
theory  enabled  him  to  go  one  step  farther, 
and  to  explain  the  life  history  of  each  of 
these  types  of  organism.  But  it  did  not 
help  him  to  account  for  the  types  them- 
selves; it  did  not  show  why  there  were 
ferns  and  why  there  were  roses,  why  there 
were  oysters  and  why  there  were  rabbits. 
Darwinism  offered  a  solution  of  this 
problem.  Darwin  taught  that  each  type 
or  species  was  developed  by  a  gradual 
process  of  adaptation  to  its  surroundings 
through  a  long  series  of  generations.  He 
explained  the  life  history  of  the  type  as 
well  as  the  life  history  of  the  individual. 

No  two  living  creatures  are  exactly 
alike.  Both  among  plants  and  among 
animals  the  offspring  varies  slightly  from 
the  parent  stock.  Some  of  these  variations 
tend  to  preserve  the  life  of  the  plant  or 
animal  in  its  struggle  for  existence,  others 
tend  to  hinder  it.    The  characteristics  that 

29 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

prove  a  hindrance  In  the  struggle  are 
ehminated  by  the  death  of  the  individuals 
that  possess  them.  The  characteristics 
that  prove  a  help  in  the  struggle  are  pre- 
served. It  is  immaterial  whether  the 
advantageous  trait  which  at  first  sprung 
up  by  accident  be  communicated  by  inheri- 
tance or  whether  it  become  universal  by 
the  slower  process  of  eliminating  all  the 
individuals  that  do  not  possess  it.  The 
result  is  the  same  in  either  case. 

Such  was  Darwin's  theory  of  natural 
selection.  In  spite  of  the  patience  with 
which  it  had  been  developed  and  the 
brilliant  reasoning  with  which  it  was 
urged,  many  of  Darwin's  contemporaries 
hesitated  to  accept  it  because  it  undertook 
to  explain  so  much  which  previous  genera- 
tions had  been  compelled  to  take  for 
granted.  But  the  younger  men  received  it 
with  enthusiasm;  and  each  decade  as  it  has 
passed    has   confirmed    the    essential    cor- 

30 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

rectness  of  Darwin's  conclusions.  The 
evidence  furnished  by  the  progress  of 
geological  science  was  particularly  strong. 
The  successive  series  of  fossil-bearing 
strata  showed  a  development  and  differ- 
entiation of  the  forms  of  animal  and  plant 
life  which  indicated  that  different  species 
were  not  created  all  at  once  or  by  separate 
acts  of  miraculous  power,  but  by  an  orderly 
process  of  elimination  and  survival. 

The  influence  of  Darwin  in  modifying 
scientific  conceptions  did  not  stop  with 
animal  and  vegetable  physiology.  It  soon 
became  evident  that  the  principle  of  nat- 
ural selection  would  explain  more  things 
and  more  important  things  than  the  origin 
of  biological  species.  Human  life,  even 
more  than  plant  life  or  animal  life,  repre- 
sents a  constant  series  of  variations.  The 
whole  process  of  history  as  we  see  it  going 
on  about  us  is  a  record  of  a  struggle  for 
existence.       Those    who    are    adapted   to 

31 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

their  surroundings  maintain  their  place  in 
line;  those  who  are  ill  adapted  fall  by  the 
wayside.  It  is  by  a  process  like  this  that 
tribes  and  nations  are  welded  together;  it 
is  by  a  process  like  this  that  political  insti- 
tutions are  built  up.  In  a  book  like 
Bagehot's  Physics  and  Politics  we  see 
traced  out  the  application  of  Darwin's 
theory  and  the  explanation  of  the  public 
life  of  organized  bodies  of  men.  In  fact, 
the  application  of  the  Darwinian  theory  to 
political  history  is  clearer  than  its  appli- 
cation to  natural  history,  and  its  successive 
steps  can  be  traced  far  more  surely. 

Nor  does  the  application  of  the  theory 
stop  short  with  politics.  It  explains  the 
origin  and  development  of  ethical  concep- 
tions as  no  other  theory  has  ever  yet  been 
able  to  explain  them.  The  human  struggle 
for  existence  is  not  a  struggle  between 
individuals.  It  is  a  struggle  between 
groups,  in  which  the  morals  of  the  group 

32 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

count  for  more  than  the  physical  charac- 
teristics of  the  individual  members.  Look- 
ing back  over  the  record  of  human  history 
as  far  as  we  can  trace  It,  we  see  that  the 
savage  was  gradually  crowded  out  by  the 
civilized  man  because  the  civilized  man  had 
developed  discipline  and  sympathy  and 
toleration;  because  he  had  learned  to  sub- 
stitute reverence  for  superstition  and 
true  fortitude  for  mere  animal  courage; 
because  he  had  accustomed  himself  to  keep 
his  temper  and  to  put  the  law  above  per- 
sonal interests,  and  to  live  in  charity  with 
a  larger  and  larger  section  of  mankind. 
The  whole  progress  of  civilization,  so  far 
as  it  is  worth  recording,  is  the  record  of 
the  displacement  of  animal  excellences  by 
human  ones  and  of  savage  virtues  by 
civilized  ones.  This  displacement  follows 
the  lines  laid  down  by  Darwin  in  his 
theories  of  animal  and  plant  life;  and  it  is 
being  understood  and  developed  today  as 

33 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

it    could   not   have   been   understood   and 
developed  two  generations  ago. 

It  will  perhaps  seem  strange  to  some  of 
you  if  I  say  that  Darwinism  has  become 
the  basis  of  a  new  spiritual  philosophy  of 
life.      Yet    this    statement    is    profoundly 
true;  and  Its  truth  becomes  more  obvious 
the  more  we  compare  the  old  science  and 
the   old  scientific  thinking   with  the  new. 
The    positive    philosophy    of    Comte,    to 
which  I  have  already  alluded,  represented 
a    view   of   life    and   thought   which   was 
widely  current  In  the  early  half  of  the  cen- 
tury.     Comte's   philosophy  was  distinctly 
anti-spiritual.     He  said  that  science  In  its 
progress  toward  perfection  went  through 
three  stages:  the  theological  stage,  where 
everything  was  explained  by  the  action  of 
God;  the  metaphysical  stage,  where  people 
tried  to  explain  things  by  theories;  and  the 
truly  scientific  stage,  where  they  were  con- 
tent to  look  at  facts.     Comte's  Ideal  of 

34 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

perfect  science  was  a  beautifully  ordered 
index  of  the  universe,  where  God  was 
entirely  left  out  and  where  law  meant  little 
more  than  classification.  The  Darwinian 
theory  has  reintroduced  ideas  of  law  which 
Comte  would  have  characterized  as  meta- 
physical, and  has  made  room  for  ideas  of 
God  which  Comte  would  have  contemned 
as  theological.  The  scientific  man  today 
is  concerned  to  find  the  purpose  and  reason 
of  things.  He  is  concerned  to  bring  the 
individual  facts,  not  only  into  their  proper 
place  in  a  scheme  of  the  universe,  but  into 
their  proper  subordination  to  a  series  of 
forces  which  he  figures  and  conceives  in 
terms  at  which  Comte  would  have  shud- 
dered. He  is  concerned  to  study  the  right 
and  wrong  of  things;  and  he  believes,  as 
the  very  essence  of  his  theory,  that  the 
right  is  that  which  will  prevail  in  the  long 
run.  The  philosophy  of  the  Darwinian  is 
in  its  essence  the  philosophy  of  Gamaliel: 

35 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

"If  this  counsel  or  this  work  be  of  men,  it 
will  come  to  nought :  but  if  it  be  of  God,  ye 
cannot  overthrow  it;  lest  haply  ye  be  found 
even  to  fight  against  God." 

To  the  man  who,  like  the  founder  of 
these  lectures,  finds  in  an  ordered  universe 
an  evidence  of  a  wise  creator  and  a  reve- 
lation of  God's  methods,  the  Darwinian 
theory  comes  as  a  welcome  contribution  of 
science  to  theistic  philosophy.  It  was  un- 
fortunately not  received  in  that  spirit  by 
the  world  as  a  whole.  Men  who  had  been 
brought  up  to  think  that  God  created  the 
world  in  one  way,  however  irrational  and 
disorderly,  believed  that  his  worship  was 
threatened  by  any  evidence  that  went  to 
show  that  it  had  been  created  in  some  other 
way,  however  rational  and  orderly.  In 
this  respect,  the  Darwinian  theory  has 
simply  suffered  the  fate  which  has  at  first 
befallen    every    scientific   discovery   which 

was  stated  in  terms  that  the  public  could 

36 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

understand.     When  Copernicus  and  Gali- 
leo  developed  the  theory  that  the   earth 
and  all  the  other  planets  moved  round  the 
sun,  they  gave  us  an  orderly  and  simple 
astronomical   system   Instead   of   a    disor- 
derly and  complicated  one;  yet  the  Coper- 
nican  system  was  condemned  by  conserva- 
tive men  as  impious,  because  they  had  been 
brought  up  to  believe  that  God  had  made 
the  world  in  a  different  way  and  they  could 
find  scripture  texts  which  seemed  to  sup- 
port   their   position.      We    have    learned 
better.     We   have   found  out  that  God's 
rulership  of  the  universe  is  not  dependent 
upon  the   relative  positions   of  the   earth 
and  the  sun  in  our  planetary  system;  and 
we  leave  it  to  men  like  John  Jasper  to  make 
it   a   fundamental  doctrine  of  the   church 
that    "the    sun    do   move."      But    not    all 
churches    have   yet   learned   to    treat    the 
principle  of  natural  selection  in  the  same 
large-minded  spirit.    Men  of  standing  and 

37 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

influence  In  the  community  condemned  the 
theory  that  species  had  been  created  under 
the  operation  of  general  laws,  In  the  same 
way  and  for  nearly  the  same  reason  that 
their  ancestors  two  centuries  earlier  had 
condemned  the  doctrine  that  the  earth  and 
the  other  planets  moved  around  the  sun 
under  the  operation  of  general  laws. 

Nor  was  this  kind  of  misunderstanding 
confined  to  the  opponents  of  the  Darwinian 
theory.  Many  of  those  who  supposed  that 
they  were  advocating  it  enthusiastically 
preached  it  In  forms  which  Its  founder 
would  hardly  have  recognized  and  based 
its  advocacy  on  reasons  which  he  would 
have  repudiated.  "There  Is  a  picture  of 
Charles  Darwin  In  thousands  of  homes," 
said  a  careful  student  of  social  problems, 
"whose  occupants  care  nothing  for  science 
and  know  nothing  of  what  Darwin  really 
said,  but  who  revere  him  because  he  Is  an 
intellectual    force   on  which   their   priests 

38 


CONCEPTIONS  OF  SCIENCE 

have  declared  war.  They  love  him,  not 
for  the  order  that  he  has  introduced  into 
our  thinking,  but  for  the  disorder  which  he 
has  been  falsely  charged  with  introduc- 
ing." For  one  man  who  knows  Darwin 
at  first  hand — careful,  peaceful,  and 
slow  to  generalize — there  are  twenty  who 
identify  him  with  the  diatribes  of  Haeckel 
or  the  metaphysical  theories  of  Herbert 
Spencer. 

We  shall  best  understand  the  true  sig- 
nificance of  Darwinism  if  we  dissociate  it 
from  the  polemics  which  have  been  waged 
about  it  and  the  philosophies  which  have 
connected  themselves  with  it,  and  treat  it 
for  what  it  was — an  orderly  explanation  of 
facts  which  previously  had  not  been  ex- 
plained; the  last,  and  in  many  respects  the 
most  novel,  of  the  three  great  theoretical 
discoveries  which  the  nineteenth  century 
has  contributed  to  the  development  of 
modern  science. 

39 


Ill 

NEW  VIEWS  OF  POLITICS  AND  OF 
ETHICS 

^  I  ^HE  political  thought  of  Europe  suice 
-*-  1789  has  passed  through  three 
phases  or  stages:  the  revolutionary  stage 
from  1789  to  1 8 15,  the  individualistic 
stage  from  181 5  to  1848,  and  the  nation- 
alistic stage  from  1848  onward. 

The  ideals  of  the  revolutionary  thinkers 
were  summed  up  in  the  three  watchwords, 
Liberty,  Equality,  and  Fraternity.  These 
were  not  mere  phrases,  as  some  people  are 
inclined  to  assume.  They  represented 
important  political  ideals  and  aspirations. 
But  none  of  these  watchwords  meant  quite 
what  we  are  apt  to  think  it  did.  The 
Frenchmen  of  1789  did  not  understand  the 
term  liberty  as  an  American  or  English- 
man understands  it.     They  did  not  mean 

40 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

the  right  of  each  man  to  mind  his  own 
business,  or  what  he  regarded  as  his  own 
business;  they  meant  the  right  of  every 
man  to  mind  other  people's  business.  They 
meant  by  liberty  much  more  nearly  what 
we  now  mean  by  democracy.  They  wanted 
to  put  the  government  directly  into  the 
hands  of  the  voters,  with  as  few  limitations 
as  possible  upon  popular  action.  Liberty, 
in  their  minds,  was  not  only  opposed  to 
monarchy,  which  put  the  government  in 
the  hands  of  a  sovereign;  but  it  was 
almost  equally  opposed  to  constitution- 
alism, which  compelled  the  government 
to  proceed  deliberately  and  to  exercise  its 
power  within  traditional  limits  and  by 
traditional  methods. 

Nor  did  they  understand  the  term 
equality  as  meaning  communism,  though 
some  of  the  leaders  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion in  its  later  stages  were  themselves 
communists.       They    did    not    intend    to 

41 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

abolish  property.  They  did  not  even 
intend  to  abolish  all  inequalities  of  owner- 
ship or  condition.  Equality  meant  govern- 
ment under  general  laws  that  applied  to  all 
people  alike,  as  distinct  from  the  system 
of  privilege  or  class  legislation  that  had 
prevailed  in  France  up  to  the  close  of  the 
last  century — with  one  law  for  the  noble, 
another  for  the  priest,  another  for  the 
merchant,  and  another  for  the  farmer. 

Nor  did  the  term  fraternity  mean  the 
practical  exercise  of  brotherly  love.  It 
meant  an  aspiration  toward  harmony  of 
interests  among  different  members  of  the 
human  race  instead  of  the  helium  omnium 
contra  omnes  which  earlier  philosophers 
had  assumed  to  be  the  natural  and  normal 
state.  When  the  French  Revolutionists 
added  the  word  fraternity  to  the  words 
liberty  and  equality,  they  meant  that  by 
putting  government  in  the  hands  of  the 
people  and  governing  under  general  laws, 

42 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

they  expected  to  govern  for  the  good  of 
humanity  as  a  whole.  Fraternity  was 
opposed  to  intellectual  selfishness,  whether 
individual  or  national. 

The  French  Revolution  came  and  went. 
After  a  quarter  of  a  century  of  struggle 
the  first  of  the  objects  of  the  Revolution- 
ists— liberty  as  its  champions  conceived 
it — remained  unrealized.  The  second  and 
third  objects,  equality  and  fraternity,  were 
secured  to  a  substantial  degree. 

The  experiment  of  putting  unrestricted 
power  into  the  hands  of  the  people  had 
failed.  Pure  or  unconstitutional  democ- 
racy had  worked  so  badly  that  it  wrought 
its  own  ruin.  France  and  Germany  had 
gone  back  to  the  hands  of  the  old  monar- 
chical families.  But  equality — government 
of  the  people  under  general  laws — had 
worked  well.  The  communities  that  en- 
joyed its  benefits  increased  rapidly  in  pros- 
perity and  in  intelligence.     Prior  to  1789 

43 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

England  and  America  had  been  the  only 
countries  where  the  general  principles  of 
the  law  applied  indiscriminately  to  every- 
body, instead  of  applying  in  one  way  to  the 
noble  and  in  another  way  to  the  peasant. 
The  result  was  that  the  standard  of  life 
of  the  people  in  England  and  America  had 
been  much  better  than  in  France  or  Ger- 
many. When  the  system  of  equality  was 
applied  to  France  the  general  condition  of 
the  French  people  was  quick  to  improve. 
When  the  same  thing  was  applied  to  west- 
ern Germany,  even  though  it  was  imposed 
by  a  foreign  hand,  western  Germany  re- 
sponded in  the  same  fashion.  The  Napo- 
leonic code  gave  it  better  government  than 
it  had  ever  had  before.  The  people 
became  accustomed  to  look  at  law  as  a 
thing  to  be  applied  impartially  to  all  indi- 
viduals, instead  of  differently  for  different 
classes.  Down  to  the  present  day  there 
is  a  contrast  in  the  public  attitude  on  this 

44 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

matter  between  those  parts  of  Germany 
where  the  code  prevailed  and  those  where 
it  did  not. 

In  a  remarkable  letter  to  his  brother, 
Napoleon  said  that  the  sentiment  which 
would  result  from  this  kind  of  government 
would  be  a  strong  barrier  against  the 
attempt  of  states  like  Prussia  and  Austria 
to  reconquer  western  Germany.  His  pre- 
vision was  fulfilled,  though  in  a  different 
manner  from  what  he  expected.  The 
code  did  not  prevent  Prussia  and  Austria 
from  returning  into  power  in  the  German 
Confederation;  but  it  did  prevent  them 
from  exercising  that  power  to  put  things 
back  where  they  were  before.  The  petty 
princes  in  Germany  were  no  more  able  to 
abolish  the  principle  of  equality  than  were 
the  Bourbons  in  France.  They  would  have 
been  glad  to  do  so,  for  they  hated  it  with 
all  their  hearts;  but  it  was  beyond  their 
power.       Napoleon's     military     successes 

45 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

had  been  followed  by  defeat.  His  legal 
success  in  establishing  the  code  that  bears 
his  name  was  more  permanent,  and  gives 
him,  I  think,  a  firmer  title  to  fame  than 
did  his  military  victories.  The  Bourbons 
could  overthrow  democracy,  because  de- 
mocracy had  worked  badly.  They  could 
not  overthrow  equality,  because  equality 
had  worked  well. 

Nor  did  they  overthrow  the  aspirations 
and  aims  which  were  embodied  in  the  term 
fraternity.  In  fact,  they  tried  to  annex 
them  and  use  them  for  their  own  purposes. 
The  sovereigns  who  formed  the  Holy 
Alliance  during  the  years  from  1815  to 
1825  claimed  to  be  serving  the  sacred 
cause  of  humanity  when  they  persecuted 
republicans,  just  as  glibly  as  did  the  Com- 
mittee of  Public  Safety  when  they  perse- 
cuted Royalists  a  generation  earlier;  and 
in  each  case  it  is  probable  that  many  of 
the    perpetrators    of    deeds    of    violence 

46 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

honestly  believed  that  they  were  dohig  it 
for  the  good  of  all  mankind.  Alexander 
of  Russia  and  St.  Just  of  the  Terror  had 
more  in  common  than  either  of  them  would 
have  liked  to  admit.  What  was  true  to 
some  degree  of  monarchs  was  true  to  an 
even  larger  degree  of  political  and  literary 
leaders.  Enthusiasm  for  the  human  race 
as  a  w^hole  was  fashionable.  The  religion 
of  humanity  became  a  watchword.  The 
statement  of  the  utilitarians  that  moral  and 
political  good  meant  neither  more  nor  less 
than  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest 
number,  was  accepted  as  an  axiom  or 
postulate  of  ethical  science. 

Taking  the  principle  of  equality  before 
the  law  as  a  starting  point,  and  the  attain- 
ment of  the  greatest  happiness  of  the 
greatest  number  as  a  goal,  Jeremy  Ben- 
tham    and    his    followers    developed    the 

system   of  political  philosophy  known   as 

47 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

individualism.  Bentham's  Fragment  on 
Government,  like  Adam  Smith's  Wealth 
of  Nations,  appeared  in  i^yS;  but  the  full 
working  out  of  his  theories  was  reserved 
for  the  century  following,  when  a  suc- 
cession of  brilliant  English  and  French 
writers,  beginning  with  Ricardo  and  end- 
ing with  John  Stuart  Mill,  undertook  to 
make  them  the  basis  of  social  order  and 
social  progress. 

The  underlying  idea  of  individualism  is 
that  the  free  action  of  intelligent  men, 
working  out  their  own  ideas  independently, 
will  produce  a  good  collective  result  for 
the  community.  The  individualist  is  essen- 
tially an  optimist.  He  believes  that  en- 
lightened selfishness  tends  to  make  a  man 
do  well  for  others  besides  himself,  and 
that  the  work  of  the  law  maker  consists 
chiefly  in  giving  each  man  a  fair  chance 
to  pursue  his  own  ends  with  as  much 
enlightenment  and  as  little  interference  as 

48 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

possible.      The    statement    which    is    fre- 
quently made  that   individualism   regards 
humanity  as  made  up  of  disconnected  and 
warring    atoms — I    quote    this    from    an 
address  by  the  Bishop  of  Durham  twenty- 
five  years  ago — is  precisely  the  reverse  of 
the  truth.     The  individualist  believes  that 
men  naturally   work   together   instead   of 
apart;  and  his  mistakes,  such  as  they  are, 
arise  from  exaggerating  the  harmony  of 
human  interests  instead  of  underrating  it. 
I  have  spoken  of  individualism  as  dat- 
ing from  Ricardo  and  Bentham.     But  its 
origin  is  really  to  be  sought  in  the  decisions 
of  the  English  common  law  judges  during 
the  three  or  four  centuries  that  had  pre- 
ceded.    These  judges  discovered  the  prin- 
ciple   of    competition    and    the    beneficent 
results    that    competition    would    produce. 
They  saw  that  if  a  baker  charged  too  high 
a  price  for  his  bread,  the  thing  to  do  was 

to  encourage  other  bakers  to  come  into  the 

49 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

same  community  and  increase  the  supply. 
The  self-interest  of  the  bakers  would  pro- 
duce better  results  than  the  punitive  action 
of  the  magistrates.  Of  course  there  were 
exceptions  which  had  to  be  dealt  with  by 
exceptional  methods.  There  were  times 
when  the  high  price  of  bread  was  the 
result  of  a  conspiracy,  and  then  it  was 
right  to  punish  the  conspirators.  But  in 
nine  cases  out  of  ten  the  high  price  was 
the  symptom  of  scarcity;  and  the  best 
way  of  dealing  with  the  evil  was  to  make 
it  for  the  interest  of  other  people  to  come 
and  lower  the  price  by  the  only  method 
that  was  permanently  effectual — by  the 
offer  of  additional  supplies.  When  a  man 
finds  the  best  market  for  his  own  goods 
he  is  generally  rendering  the  maximum 
service  to  other  men. 

But  though  the  English  judges  appre- 
hended and  stated  this  principle  clearly, 
they    were    far    from    appreciating    how 

50 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

widely  it  could  be  applied.  They  used  it 
as  a  means  of  justifying  certain  methods 
of  price  regulation  and  rejecting  certain 
other  methods.  It  was  not  until  the  latter 
part  of  the  eighteenth  century  that  Adam 
Smith  showed  how  this  principle  could  be 
made  the  basis,  not  merely  for  deciding  a 
few  judicial  controversies,  but  for  explain- 
ing the  causes  that  determine  the  wealth 
of  nations.  It  was  not  until  the  generation 
after  Adam  Smith  that  it  became  the 
foundation  of  an  organized  system  of 
political  economy,  as  developed  by  Ricardo 
and  Malthus  and  their  associates.  Prin- 
ciples which  had  been  buried  for  centuries 
in  law  books  and  law  reports  now  became 
matter  of  common  interest,  because  the 
time  was  ripe  for  their  acceptance.  The 
public  mind  of  that  generation  welcomed 
the  theory  that  free  competition  among 
individuals  and  free  trade  among  nations 

represented  the  normal  condition  of  busi- 

51 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

ness  activity,  and  that  any  interference  with 
this  condition  was  at  best  an  unfortunate 
necessity.  Nor  was  the  application  of 
these  theories  confined  to  the  field  of 
economics.  Herbert  Spencer,  in  one  of 
his  earher  works,  his  Social  Statics,  tried 
to  show  how  the  exercise  of  individual 
intelligence  would  produce  the  same  kind 
of  results  in  politics  and  in  morals  that  it 
did  in  business.  "The  best  government  is 
that  which  governs  least" — this  was  a 
phrase  so  often  repeated  that  it  became 
a  proverb  and  took  its  place  in  the  book 
of  current  phrases,  along  with  that  similar 
mixture  of  wisdom  and  unwisdom,  "Happy 
is  the  nation  that  has  no  history." 

To  people  who  look  at  politics  and 
morals  in  this  way,  the  actual  form  of 
government  may  become  a  matter  of  rela- 
tively little  concern.  The  less  the  sover- 
eign does  the  less  does  it  matter  who  is 

sovereign.      If  the  citizens   are  to  be   al- 

52 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

lowed  to  direct  their  own  affairs  as  much 
as  possible,  it  is  of  comparatively  little 
consequence  whether  the  government  is 
elective  or  hereditary,  democratic  or 
aristocratic. 

For  a  long  time  the  individualists  had 
everything  their  own  way.  The  monopo- 
lies and  privileges  granted  in  the  eight- 
eenth century  had  been  so  bad  that  their 
removal  did  much  good  and  little  harm. 
The  restrictions  upon  trade  in  different 
communities  had  been  so  arbitrary  that  the 
removal  of  these  restrictions  tended  to 
increase  prosperity  in  at  least  nine  cases 
out  of  ten.  The  liberty  which  people 
sought  in  the  days  following  the  downfall 
of  Napoleon  was  the  English  kind  of 
liberty  rather  than  the  French  kind  of 
liberty — freedom  to  pursue  one's  own 
course  with  as  little  interference  from 
others  as  possible,  rather  than  freedom  to 
hold  frequent  elections  in  order  that  the 

53 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

majority  of  men  might  decide  what  the 
minority  should  be  compelled  to  do.  For 
a  long  time  the  voice  of  Hegel  was  the 
only  important  one  that  was  lifted  in  pro- 
test. But  as  early  as  1830  symptoms  of  a 
somewhat  widespread  reaction  in  thought 
began  to  make  themselves  manifest — 
reaction  against  individualism  and  in  favor 
of  socialism.  It  is  rather  interesting  to 
note  that  the  word  "socialism"  was  coined 
to  designate,  not  so  much  a  positive  theory 
or  programme,  as  a  protest  against  indi- 
vidualism and  its  consequences;  to  express 
by  a  single  phrase  the  attitude  of  those 
who  did  not  believe  that  the  needs  of  the 
community  could  be  met  by  the  independ- 
ent action  of  its  individual  members. 

The  first  attacks  of  the  socialists  were 
not  directed  against  the  general  principle 
that  free  play  of  individual  activity  would 
produce  the  best  results  for  the  commu- 
nity, but  against  the  idea  that  there  could 

54 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

be,  under  existing  legal  conditions,  any- 
thing like  free  play  of  individual  activity. 
There  is  not  equality  of  opportunity,  said 
Marx;  and  any  results  which  are  predi- 
cated upon  an  alleged  equality  of  oppor- 
tunity for  all  men  must  be  false  results. 
Theoretically  you  expect  all  to  share  alike 
in  the  benefits  of  competition.  Practically 
it  may  mean  the  exploitation  of  the  weak 
by  the  strong.  Theoretically  you  say  that 
every  one  has  a  fair  chance  at  the  gains  of 
industrial  enterprise.  Practically  the  man 
who  has  gotten  hold  of  capital,  whether 
by  good  fortune,  by  inheritance,  or  by  ras- 
cality, has  an  advantage  which  it  is  hard 
for  any  one  else  to  overcome.  It  is  only 
too  easy  to  find  cases  where  the  laborers 
have  been  in  fact  exploited;  cases  where 
the  freest  opportunity  to  trade  has  pro- 
duced inequality  instead  of  equality.  By  a 
skilful  citation  and  presentation  of  these 
cases,  the  socialists  excited  the  laborers  of 

55 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

European  cities  to  a  ferment  which  culmi- 
nated in  the  Revolution  of  1848. 

The  immediate  effect  of  this  Revolution 
was  to  bring  radical  leaders  to  the  front 
and    give    them    a    chance    to    try    their 
theories.     The  result  of  this  trial  was  not 
successful.      A    few    months'    experiment 
with  the  practical  workings   of  socialism 
dealt  the  cause  a  blow  from  which  it  took 
it  at  least  a  generation  to  recover.     How- 
ever  good  the   theories   of    Marx   might 
sound,   the  practical   application   of  them 
was  disastrous.    But  in  spite  of  this  failure 
and  the   resulting   discredit  of   socialism, 
people  did  not  go  back  to  the  old  ideas  of 
free  trade  and  enthusiasm  for  the  cause  of 
humanity.     National  aspirations  had  been 
awakened    by    the    Revolution;    national 
feelings    and    sentiments   came    into   play. 
Though   the   efforts   of  Hungary   and   of 
Italy  in  1849  were  crushed,  the  spirit  which 
they     engendered     remained     and     grew 

56 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

Strong.  Italy  became  a  nation  in  1859; 
the  United  States,  in  1865;  Germany,  in 
1866.  Russia  proclaimed  herself  the 
champion  of  Slavonic  unity,  and  in  1878 
succeeded  in  freeing  the  peoples  of  the 
lower  Danube  from  the  domination  of 
Turkey.  The  sentiment  of  patriotism 
grew;  the  sentiment  of  humanitarianism 
was  forced  into  the  background.  The  man 
who  was  an  intense  patriot  found  it  hard 
to  be  devoted  to  the  religion  of  humanity. 
A  good  American  cared  more  for  his  fel- 
low Americans  than  he  did  for  those  who 
had  been  unfortunate  enough  to  be  born  in 
England  or  France  or  Germany  and  be- 
nighted enough  to  remain  there.  It  was 
the  same  way  with  other  countries.  "The 
whole  Eastern  question  is  not  worth  the 
blood  of  a  single  soldier  from  the  German 
fatherland,"  was  the  remark  of  no  less  a 
person  than  Bismarck  himself,  the  greatest 

leader  in  all  this  nationalistic  movement. 

57 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

In  the  years  which  followed  the  Revo- 
lution of  1848,  a  large  part  of  the  social- 
istic sentiment  turned  itself  into  the  new 
"nationalistic"  channels  opened  for  it  by 
men  like  Bismarck  and  Cavour.  While 
Marx  was  vainly  striving  to  keep  the 
"International"  together,  Ferdinand  Las- 
salle  and  his  followers  welcomed  the 
growth  of  national  government  as  a  means 
of  curbing  the  power  of  industrial  organi- 
zations. Bismarck  wanted  to  strengthen 
the  king  of  Prussia;  Lassalle  wanted  to 
weaken  the  bankers  in  Frankfort.  For 
the  moment  the  interests  of  the  two  coin- 
cided. I  shall  not  attempt  to  trace  in 
detail  the  history  of  the  nationalistic  move- 
ment which  changed  loose  federations  of 
states  to  strong  centralized  governments, 
and  produced  successively  a  united  Italy, 
a  united  America,  and  a  united  Germany. 
I  shall  simply  call  your  attention  to  its 
effect   in  producing   two   industrial  conse- 

58 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

quences  of  great  importance,  high  tariffs 
and  large  standing  armies — or,  if  you  pre- 
fer to  express  the  change  in  abstract  terms 
Instead  of  concrete  ones,  protection  and 
militarism, 

Down  to  i860  Europe  had  moved  grad- 
ually but  surely  in  the  direction  of  free 
trade.  Tariffs  were  lowered;  international 
exchange  of  products  was  encouraged  by 
the  statesmen  of  the  several  countries.  It 
was  held  that  if  different  nations  had 
advantages  for  producing  different  sets  of 
goods,  the  gain  by  trade  was  mutual;  in 
short,  that  division  of  labor  between 
nations  was  as  natural  and  normal  a  thing 
as  division  of  labor  between  individuals. 
With  the  advent  of  the  nationalistic  spirit 
there  arose  a  desire  on  the  part  of  each 
people  to  be  sufficient  for  itself;  a  feeling 
that  trade  with  other  nations  meant  de- 
pendence upon  other  nations;  a  suspicion 
that  the  gain  in  foreign  commerce  was  not 

59 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

a  mutual  advantage  but  an  advantage  that 
accrued  to  the  one  that  exported  most 
goods  and  got  most  gold  in  return.  Tar- 
iffs began  to  go  up  instead  of  to  go  down. 
Taxes  imposed  temporarily  as  war  meas- 
ures were  retained  after  the  wars  them- 
selves had  ceased. 

In  like  manner  the  standing  armies 
which  nations  had  supported  during  the 
early  part  of  the  nineteenth  century  were 
relatively  small.  Even  those  countries  like 
Germany  or  Austria,  which  had  a  large 
and  officious  internal  police,  maintained 
comparatively  small  military  establish- 
ments for  defense  against  their  neighbors. 
The  years  following  i860  witnessed  a 
change  in  this  respect  also.  The  system  of 
compulsory  military  service  for  the  whole 
body  of  grown  men  was  enforced  by 
Bismarck  and  Moltke,  until  it  was  pos- 
sible to  convert  the  nation  Into  an  armed 
camp  on  a  few  days'  notice.    The  successes 


60 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

of  Prussia  against  Austria  in  1866  and 
France  in  1870  caused  the  other  nations 
of  the  European  continent  to  model  their 
estabhshments  upon  that  of  Prussia.  The 
desire  of  different  peoples  to  have  colonies 
in  which  to  make  money,  and  world-wide 
possessions  to  give  an  imperial  character 
to  their  dominion,  led  to  an  increase  in 
the  world's  navies  proportionate  to  that 
which  had  already  come  about  in  the 
world's  armies.  So  definite  is  the  popular 
conviction  of  the  necessity  of  these  mili- 
tary establishments  and  so  profound  the 
distrust  that  each  nation  feels  concerning 
the  intentions  of  its  neighbors,  that  the 
proposal  made  at  the  beginning  of  the 
first  Hague  Conference  to  reduce  by 
mutual  agreement  the  armed  forces  of  the 
powers  represented  was  definitively  re- 
jected and  came  near  wrecking  the  success 
of  the  conference  as  a  whole. 

We  no  longer  assume  that  the  interests 

61 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

of  nations  are  identical.  We  no  longer 
assume  that  it  is  desirable  to  remove  bar- 
riers that  separate  humanity  into  different 
parts.  We  have  pretty  much  abolished 
"fraternity."  We  are  so  full  of  national 
aspirations  that  human  aspirations  fall 
into  the  background.  Each  nation  wants 
to  be  the  strongest.  If  a  change  in  the 
tariff  law  hurts  England  or  Germany,  we 
think  that  it  is  probably  good  for  America. 
In  place  of  a  well-ordered  harmony  of 
interests,  which  the  statesmen  of  1850 
tried  in  their  various  ways  to  compass,  the 
statesmen  of  1900  content  themselves  with 
some  semblance  of  order  in  their  antag- 
onisms. 

This  change  of  feeling  about  politics  and 
about  trade  was  accompanied  by  a  similar 
change  of  feeling  about  morals. 

Down    to    the    middle    of    the    century 

there  had  been  a  tendency  to  assume  that 

62 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

the  interests  of  the  individual  and  the 
interests  of  the  community  were  identical, 
and  that  any  seeming  antagonism  between 
the  two  was  due  to  want  of  intelligence. 
Rational  selfishness  and  rational  unselfish- 
ness were  thought  to  lead  to  identical 
results.  If  you  could  only  teach  a  man  to 
know  what  was  really  good  for  him  he 
would  do  what  was  good  for  the  commu- 
nity, and  be  rewarded  by  permanent  pros- 
perity and  by  the  approval  of  his  fellow 
men,  instead  of  doing  what  he  thought 
good  for  himself  and  getting  his  reward 
in  the  shape  of  pleasures  of  a  lower  or 
less  lasting  character.  This  was  a  com- 
fortable theory  to  hold.  If  you  believed 
people  were  going  to  be  selfish  in  any 
event,  it  was  pleasant  to  think  that  their 
selfishness  would  have  good  results  for 
others.  If  you  were  anxious  to  have  the 
community  prosperous,  it  was  pleasant  to 
think  that   this   end  could  be   secured   by 

63 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

appeals  to  individual  self-interest  no  less 
than  to  individual  public  spirit.  But  there 
were  so  many  cases  where  things  did  not 
work  that  way — where  selfishness  went 
without  punishment  and  unselfishness  with- 
out reward — that  this  theory  of  harmony 
of  interests  was  abandoned.  Some  men, 
like  Carlyle,  boldly  attacked  liberty  and 
proclaimed  themselves  champions  of  au- 
thority. The  necessary  and  desirable  thing 
for  a  nation,  according  to  Carlyle,  was  not 
to  let  each  man  take  his  own  way,  but  to 
let  all  men  unite  in  obeying  the  strongest 
and  best.  Those  who  continued  to  defend 
liberty  did  so,  not  because  the  free  action 
of  the  individual  necessarily  produced  the 
best  results  for  the  community,  but  because 
it  gave  people  the  best  chance  of  finding 
who  was  fitted  to  lead. 

In  England,  the  break  between  the  old 
and  the  new  liberalism  was  not  a  sharp  or 
sudden  one.     The  English  liberals,  under 

64 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

the  leadership  of  John  Stuart  Mill,  grad- 
ually and  almost  insensibly  gave  up  the 
belief  that  individual  selfishness  would 
produce  the  best  results  for  the  commu- 
nity, and  substituted  the  doctrine  that 
individual  freedom  would  allow  the  com- 
munity to  watch  the  results  of  different 
experiments  to  see  which  it  should  stamp 
with  its  approval.  John  Morley,  the  best 
exponent  of  this  new  school  of  thought, 
says  with  justice,  that  Carlyle  and  his 
followers  appealed  to  men  to  follow  the 
hero,  but  never  gave  any  directions  how 
to  find  him;  while  Mill's  doctrine  laid 
down  the  main  conditions  of  finding  your 
hero,  namely:  that  all  roads  should  be 
left  open  to  him,  because  no  living  man 
knew  by  which  road  he  would  come. 

While  the  discussion  was  thus  waged  in 
England  between  men  like  Carlyle  and 
Ruskin  on  the  one  side,  and  Mill  and  Mor- 
ley on  the  other,  a  school  of  thinkers  on 

65 


J 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

the  Continent  had  grappled  with  the  ques- 
tion in  their  own  fashion  and  given  a 
bolder,  though  not  a  sounder,  answer. 
Rational  conduct,  they  said,  was  neces- 
sarily calculated  selfishness.  If  this  selfish- 
ness of  the  individual  would  not  work,  out 
benefits  for  the  community  as  a  whole,  so 
much  the  worse  for  the  community.  Life, 
in  the  view  of  these  men,  is  a  struggle 
between  many  types  of  men,  in  which  each 
individual  strives  to  develop  his  powers 
and  make  his  will  the  dominant  one.  The 
best  man  is  the  one  who  succeeds. 

Friedrich  Nietzsche  is  commonly  re- 
garded as  the  leader  of  this  school,  which, 
among  the  many  perversions  of  Darwin- 
ism, is  perhaps  the  most  perverse.  But 
Nietzsche  himself  was  a  writer  of  aphor- 
isms rather  than  a  framer  of  systems. 
For  a  connected  statement  of  the  results 
of  his  thinking  we  must  look  rather  to  the 
work  of  his  followers.    Take,  for  instance, 

66 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

the    book    of    Loria,    on    The    Economic 

Foundations  of  the  Constitution  of  Society. 

Right,  says  Loria,  is  a  mere  convention — 

what  each  nation  chooses  to  make  it.     A 

few  men  get  hold  of  authority;  they  make 

rules  to  benefit  themselves  at  the  expense 

of   other   members   of   society.      If   these 

rules  are  simply  laws  and  nothing  more.  It 

is  necessary  to  have  police  to  enforce  them. 

Police  are  very  expensive ;  and  moreover 

the  police,  like  the  Turkish  janizaries,  may 

take  it  into  their  heads  to  enforce  the  laws 

against  you  instead  of  against  somebody 

else.     It  is  therefore  more  convenient  and 

effective  to  do  away  with  the  necessity  for 

so  many  police,  by  persuading  the  people 

that  these  laws  have  supernatural  sanction 

and  that  the  gods  will  punish  them  if  the 

police  do  not.    This,  they  say,  is  the  origin 

and    real    nature    of   morality.      Let    the 

enlightened  man  emancipate  himself  from 

these  delusions.     Let  him  see  that  law  Is  a 

67 


W 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

convention  and  morality  a  superstition. 
Let  him  realize  to  the  utmost  his  own  indi- 
vidual purposes  and  individual  aims.  Play 
the  game  for  yourself: — this,  says  the  fol- 
lower of  Nietzsche,  is  the  only  rational 
theory  of  conduct,  this  the  only  philosophic 
view  of  life. 

This  sounds  like  dangerous  advice.  So 
it  is — for  the  man  that  follows  it.  A  high- 
minded  philosopher  of  this  school,  like 
Nietzsche  himself,  becomes  insane;  a  low- 
minded  philosopher  of  this  school,  like 
D'Annunzio,  falls  into  animalism.  If  the 
current  system  of  morality  be  an  illusion, 
it  is  at  any  rate  an  illusion  that  protects 
the  man  and  the  race  that  hold  it.  If  the 
rejection  of  tradition  and  rule  in  the  effort 
to  play  the  game  for  one's  self  be  enlight- 
enment, it  is  the  enlightenment  that  leads 
to  the  ditch  on  the  one  hand  or  the  quag- 
mire on  the  other.  Whatever  may  be  the 
errors  or  the  dangers  in  the  complacent 

68 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

optimism  of  English  philosophers,  they 
have  proved  infinitely  less  destructive  than 
the  complacent,  not  to  say  brutal,  pessi- 
mism of  their  brethren  on  the  Continent. 
Both  these  modes  of  thought  appear  to 
be  giving  place  to  a  new  philosophy,  or 
perhaps  I  should  rather  say,  to  a  new  view 
of  life,  known  by  the  somewhat  unfortu-  /}\ 
nate  name  of  pragmatism.  Of  this  phi- 
losophy, which  is  essentially  a  development 
of  John  Morley's  theory  of  toleration, 
William  James  was  the  first  popular  advo- 
cate. Henri  Bergson  of  Paris  is  today  its 
best  recognized  exponent.  In  spite  of  all 
that  these  eminent  writers  have  done,  the 
most  compact  and  useful  statement  of  the 
principles  of  pragmatism  is  found  in  the 
fifth  chapter  of  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles. 
I  am  not  now  referring  to  the  early  part 
of  the  chapter,  that  treats  of  the  doings  of 
a  man  named  Ananias;  but  to  the  latter 
part,  from  which  I  made  a  brief  quotation 

69 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

in  the  previous  lecture,  giving  the  counsel 
of  a  wiser  man  named  Gamaliel,  a  doctor 
of  the  law,  who  said  concerning  the 
apostles : 

"Ye  men  of  Israel,  take  heed  to  your- 
selves what  ye  intend  to  do  as  touching 
these  men. 

"For  before  these  days  rose  up  Theudas, 
boasting  himself  to  be  somebody;  to  whom 
a  number  of  men,  about  four  hundred, 
joined  themselves:  who  was  slain;  and  all, 
as  many  as  obeyed  him,  were  scattered, 
and  brought  to  nought. 

"After  this  man  rose  up  Judas  of  Gali- 
lee in  the  days  of  the  taxing,  and  drew 
away  much  people  after  him:  he  also 
perished;  and  all,  even  as  many  as  obeyed 
him,  were  dispersed. 

"And  now  I  say  unto  you.  Refrain  from 

these  men,  and  let  them  alone :  for  if  this 

counsel  or  this  work  be  of  men,   it  will 

come  to  nought : 

70 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

"But  if  it  be  of  God,  ye  cannot  over- 
throw it;  lest  haply  ye  be  found  even  to 
fight  against  God," 

The  criterion  which  shows  whether  a 
thing  is  right  or  wrong  is  its  permanence. 
Survival  is  not  merely  the  characteristic  of 
right;  it  Is  the  test  of  right.  This  Is  what 
distinguishes  the  philosophy  of  the  prag- 
matlst  from  that  of  Herbert  Spencer.  Her- 
bert Spencer  made  up  his  mind  what  he 
thought  was  right,  and  then  tried  to  prove 
that  the  universe  was  working  in  that 
direction.  The  pragmatlst  tries  to  find, 
with  as  little  prejudice  as  possible,  the 
direction  In  which  the  universe  is  work- 
ing; and  he  makes  that  the  criterion  of 
right.  Spencer  was  fundamentally  a  meta- 
physician. Although  he  had  a  prodigious 
knowledge  of  fact,  he  was  constantly  try- 
ing to  arrange  the  facts  to  fit  his  theories. 
The  philosopher  of  today,  even  when  he 
is  using  the  same  terms,  is  concerned  rather 

71 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

to  make  his  theories  fit  the  facts.  He  may 
not  always  succeed,  but  in  method  and 
purpose  he  has  a  fundamental  advantage 
over  the  evolutionist  of  the  generation  that 
preceded  him. 

In    the    lower    forms    of    animal    life, 
where  the  struggle  is  between  individuals, 
the  plant  or  the  animal  that  survives  is  the 
one  we  call  best,  because  it  is  best  adapted 
to  its  purpose.     As  we  come  higher  up  in 
the  scale  the  struggle  is  no  longer  between 
individuals  but  between  families,  between 
groups,    and  ultimately  between   different 
systems  of  ethics.    It  is  no  longer  the  most 
perfectly    developed    individual,    but    the 
most    perfectly    organized    group    or    the 
most    perfectly    harmonized    system    that 
prevails   and  thereby  proves   its  right  to 
prevail.      It   is   here   that  the   pragmatist 
takes   issue   with   Nietzsche    and   his    fol- 
lowers.    The  struggle  between  individuals 
within    the    group,    though    not    entirely 

72 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

abolished,  Is  and  must  be  subordinated  to 
the  discipline  of  the  group  and  the  rules 
of  the  aspirations  of  the  group,  lest  all 
perish  together.  We  hold  the  beliefs 
which  have  preserved  our  fathers.  It  is 
not  far  from  the  truth  to  say  that  we  hold 
them  because  they  have  preserved  our 
fathers.  I  do  not  mean  that  we  should 
consciously  adopt  a  belief  because  it  is  use- 
ful to  us,  as  James  seems  to  imply.  I 
would  rather  take  the  ground  that  we  hold 
the  belief  that  has  preserved  our  fathers 
as  an  intuition  and  act  on  it  as  an  instinct. 
The  surest  knowledge,  according  to  the 
pragmatist,  is  that  which  has  been  thus 
established  by  the  habit  of  generations 
until  it  becomes  intuitive.  Reasoning  is 
of  the  nature  of  exploration.  If  we  have 
to  reason,  it  means  that  there  is  an  absence 
of  consensus  of  opinion  among  our  fellows, 
and  probably  an  absence  of  certainty  in 
our  own  minds.     I  think  it  possible  that 

73 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

every  thoroughgoing  pragmatist  ten  years 
hence  will  say  that  what  we  know  we  know 
by  instinct,  and  the  use  of  the  intellect  is  a 
confession  of  ignorance.  This  much  at 
least  is  certain:  that  the  better  we  know 
how  to  do  a  thing,  the  less  do  we  have  to 
make  conscious  use  of  our  reasoning  in 
doing  it. 

What  then  is  the  bearing  of  all  this 
psychology  on  political  and  moral  phil- 
osophy? To  bring  us  back  to  the  funda- 
mental truth  that  we  are  members  one  of 
another.  Society  is  not  a  mere  aggrega- 
tion of  individuals  bound  together  by  ties 
of  self-interest,  as  philosophers  would 
have  told  us  in  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century;  still  less  is  it  an  aggrega- 
tion of  individuals  set  apart  from  one 
another  by  the  struggle  for  existence,  as 
some  men  were  telling  us  twenty-five  years 
ago.    Human  history  represents  a  struggle 

of  groups  rather  than  a  struggle  of  sepa- 

74 


POLITICS  AND  ETHICS 

rate  men  and  women.  The  moral  and 
religious  instincts  that  bind  the  group 
together,  which  some  men,  not  so  many 
years  ago,  were  condemning  as  outworn 
prejudices,  count  for  even  more  than  the 
Individual  intelligence.  In  our  practical 
philosophy,  of  politics  and  of  life,  we  are 
reverting  to  the  words  of  Edmund  Burke: 
"We  are  afraid  to  put  men  to  live  and 
trade  each  on  his  own  private  stock  of 
reason,  because  we  suspect  that  this  stock 
in  each  man  Is  small,  and  that  the  Indi- 
viduals would  do  better  to  avail  themselves 
of  the  general  bank  and  capital  of  nations 
and  of  ages.  Many  of  our  men  of  specu- 
lation, instead  of  exploding  general  preju- 
dices, employ  their  sagacity  to  discover  the 
latent  wisdom  which  prevails  in  them.  If 
they  find  what  they  seek,  and  they  seldom 
fail,  they  think  it  more  wise  to  continue 
the  prejudice  with  the  reason  involved, 
than  to  cast  away  the  coat  of  prejudice,  and 

75 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

to  leave  nothing  but  the  naked  reason: 
because  prejudice  with  its  reason  has  a 
motive  to  give  action  to  that  reason,  and 
an  affection  which  will  give  it  perma- 
nence  Prejudice   renders   a   man's 

virtue  his  habit,  and  not  a  series  of  uncon- 
nected acts.  Through  just  prejudice,  his 
duty  becomes  a  part  of  his  nature." 


76 


IV 

THE  SPIRITUAL  BASIS  OF  RECENT 
POETRY 

THE  world  changes  the  modes  of  Its 
religious  feeling  and  thought  as  it 
changes  the  modes  of  its  political  feeling 
and  thought.  The  two  sets  of  changes  go 
hand  in  hand.  An  age  of  political  com- 
placence is  usually  an  age  of  religious 
complacence.  An  age  of  political  struggle 
is  almost  always  an  age  of  religious 
struggle.  We  think  of  the  Reformation 
as  a  religious  movement,  and  we  think  of 
the  French  Revolution  as  a  political  move- 
ment; but  the  Reformation  was  a  time  of 
political  upheavals  no  less  than  of  reli- 
gious ones,  and  the  French  Revolution  was 
marked  by  just  as  profound  convulsions 
in  the  world  of  religion  as  in  the  world  of 

politics. 

77 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

In  the  ages  of  peace,  when  authority 
Is  accepted  as  a  matter  of  course,  the 
rehgious  element  in  literature  is  apt  to 
be  essentially  mystical — a  confession  of 
human  weakness,  an  expression  of  human 
aspirations,  a  devout  homage  from  a  man 
who  feels  himself  weak  to  a  God  who  is 
immeasurably  above  him.  In  the  ages  of 
conflict  and  upheaval  religious  literature 
takes  a  different  character.  The  time  no 
longer  calls  for  meditation,  but  for  fight- 
ing— for  fighting  in  which  each  man's  own 
individual  work  may  be  overwhelmingly 
important.  The  sense  of  humility  gives 
place  to  the  feeling  of  responsibility;  the 
vagueness  of  the  aspiration  to  be  like  God 
gives  place  to  the  assertion  of  the  over- 
whelming importance  of  bringing  God  and 
the  world  together.  The  peaceful  devo- 
tion of  the  psalmist  is  overborne  by  the 
convulsive  struggles  of  the  prophet.     The 

quiet  of  the  gods  is  invaded  by  the  cries 

78 


RECENT  POETRY 

of  humanity.  Their  very  authority  is 
challenged  by  the  indomitable  will  of 
Prometheus,  the  friend  of  man.  In  such 
an  age  it  is  no  longer  to  the  voice  of  David, 
but  to  that  of  Ezekiel,  that  we  respond. 
It  Is  no  longer  the  song  of  Hesiod  or  even 
of  Pindar,  but  the  song  of  Aeschylus  and 
of  Euripides,  that  moves  men. 

A  single  instance,  chosen  to  illustrate 
this  contrast,  will  show  what  I  mean  better 
than  any  amount  of  description. 

In  a  passage  of  In  Memoriam,  much 
admired  at  the  time  of  its  publication  and 
still  much  quoted,  Tennyson  voiced  the 
religious  thought  of  a  large  part  of  the 
English-speaking  world  of  his  day  in  the 
following  lines: 

"  So  runs  my  dream :  but  what  am  I  ? 
An  infant  crying  in  the  night: 
An  infant  crying  for  the  light: 
And  with  no  language  but  a  cry." 

Not  quite  fifty  years  later  another  poet, 

79 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

Henley,  less  known  to  the  casual  reader 
but  not  less  significant  in  the  history  of 
English  literature,  put  these  burning  words 
on  paper: 

"  Out  of  the  night  that  covers  me, 
Black  as  the  Pit  from  pole  to  pole, 
I  thank  whatever  gods  may  be 
For  my  unconquerable  soul." 

In  time  these  two  utterances  are  less 
than  half  a  century  apart;  in  spirit  fifty 
centuries  would  not  measure  the  difference. 

The  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  an  age  of  religious  peace — an  age 
when  church  authority  was  accepted  as  a 
fact,  whether  the  people  believed  in  the 
doctrines  of  the  church  or  not.  Their 
doubt  and  disbelief  were  essentially  intel- 
lectual things  which  did  not  greatly  affect 
their  outward  conduct  or  even  their  inward 
feelings.  The  ideal  and  the  aim  of  those 
who  put  their  religious  emotions  into 
poetry  was  quiet  submission  to  the  author- 

80 


RECENT  POETRY 

ity  of  God.     They  were  content  to  accept 
as  mysteries  the  things  that  they  could  not 
understand,     and    by    this    acceptance    to 
achieve   in  their  own   souls  the  peace   of 
God    that    passeth    understanding.      The 
second  half  of  the  century  was  an  age  of 
religious  effort,  of  struggle.    The  religious 
poetry  of  the  time,  and  a  great  deal  that 
was    not    avowedly    religious,    was    con- 
cerned  with   finding   man's   place    in   that 
struggle.     The  God  of  the  later  days  was 
one  who  had  come  not  to  send  peace  but 
a  sword;  the  true  man  of  the  later  days 
was  the  one  who  tried  unflinchingly  to  do 
his  part,  who  never  shrank  from  the  con- 
flict because  he  could  not  see  the  end.     To 
accept   the   burdens   and  the   mistakes   of 
conflict  rather  than  seek  refuge  in  the  quiet 
haven  of  mysticism — this  is  the  message  of 
the  last  years  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
No  longer  do  we  content  ourselves  with 

saying,  as  Tennyson  did: 

81 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

"  Our  wills  are  ours,  we  know  not  how; 
Our  wills  are  ours,  to  make  them  thine." 

We  deem  it  a  truer,  as  well  as  a  nobler 
conception  of  life,  to  say  with  the  more 
modern  poet: 

"  East  and  west  and  north,  wherever  the  battle 

grew, 
Forth  to  a  feast  we  fared,  the  work  of  the  will 

to  do. 
Pillar  of  cloud  by  day,  by  night  a  pillar  of  fire. 
Sons  of  the  will,  we  fought  the  fight  of  the  will 


our  sire." 


I  shall  try  to  give  an  account,  necessa-. 
rily  brief  and  imperfect,  of  the  successive 
steps  by  which  this  change  in  thought  and 
feeling  was  brought  about. 

In  the  latter  part  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury there  lived  in  London  an  artist  named 
William  Blake;  a  genius,  self-taught, 
erratic,  and  ultimately  quite  crazy.  He  is 
chiefly  known  by  his  etchings,  which  were 
strange  enough;  but  his  writings  are 
stranger  still.     One  of  the  most  remark- 

82 


RECENT  POETRY 

able  of  these  writings  is  entitled  The 
Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell.  In  this 
extraordinary  little  book,  Blake  takes  up 
the  old  theory  of  the  Manichasans  or 
Gnostics,  so  well  known  to  those  who  have 
studied  the  early  history  of  the  Christian 
church,  and  states  it  in  terms  of  his  own. 
There  are  in  the  universe,  he  says,  two 
antagonistic  principles:  the  force  of  vital- 
ity, commonly  called  evil,  and  the  force  of 
repression,  commonly  called  good.  Right 
living  depends  on  a  proper  balancing  of 
these  two  forces.  Each  has  its  place,  and 
its  equal  place,  in  the  world's  order  and 
the  world's  progress.  That  the  principle 
of  repression  has  been  called  good  and 
that  God  has  been  identified  with  that  side 
of  life,  while  the  principle  of  vitality  is 
called  evil  and  the  spirit  that  underlies  it 
is  called  the  Devil,  is  a  mere  accident,  due 
to  the  fact  that  all  writers  on  morals  have 
been    either   priests    or   lawyers,   both   of 

83 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

which  classes   are   professional   advocates 
of  repression. 

Blake's  philosophy  did  not  find  many 
followers  in  England,  either  at  the  time 
or  for  a  century  afterward;  though  each 
of  our  two  great  American  geniuses,  Haw- 
thorne and  Poe,  had  a  conception  of  the 
spiritual  universe  like  that  which  has  just 
been  outlined.  His  first  real  successor  is, 
I  believe,  Bernard  Shaw,  who  shows  the 
influence  of  this  philosophy  in  several  of 
his  plays,  and  in  one — The  Devil's  Dis- 
ciple— frankly  accepts  Blake's  view  of  life 
in  its  entirety.  Blake  is  chiefly  important 
to  us  as  the  one  great  English  exponent  of 
a  movement  which  was  at  the  time  shak- 
ing the  thought  of  Continental  Europe  to 
its  foundations.  In  France,  Rousseau  was 
preaching  in  different  words  the  same  mes- 
sage as  Blake,  and  finding  converts  by  the 
thousand.  The  right  of  the  individual  to 
work  out  his  own  development  in  defiance 

84 


RECENT  POETRY 

of  social  traditions;  the  right  of  the  living 
present  to  shake  off  the  hand  of  the  dead 
past;  the  essential  importance  of  doing 
things,  and  the  essential  wrongness  of  try- 
ing to  stop  people  from  doing  things 
because  of  mere  conventions :  these  were 
the  thoughts  that  Rousseau  and  Rousseau's 
followers  were  developing  until  they  burst 
the  bounds  of  all  convention  in  the  great 
Revolution  of  1789.  The  same  sort  of 
thing  was  happening  in  Germany.  This 
was  the  age  which  the  historians  of  Ger- 
man literature  designate  as  the  Sturm-  iind 
Drang-Periode — the  period  of  storm  and 
stress.  It  was  then  that  Schiller  wrote  his 
tragedy  of  The  Robbers.  It  was  then  that 
Goethe  conceived  the  original  draft  of  his 
first  part  of  Faust.  In  The  Robbers 
Schiller  voices  the  protest  of  the  younger 
men  of  the  day  against  the  tyranny  of 
external  convention.  In  Faust  Goethe 
pictures   the   spirit  of   a   man   striving  to 

85 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

break  down  the  shackles  Imposed  upon  him 
by  his  own  finite  nature  and  surroundings 
and  asserting  equality  with  the  spirit  of  the 
universe.  "Shall  I  quail  before  you, 
creature  of  flame?"  says  Faust  to  the 
embodied  spirit  of  the  world  about  him. 
"It  is  I,  Faust,  your  equal" — no  less  bold 
in  the  assertion  of  equality  because  of  the 
enormous  disparity  in  power. 

The  day  of  storm  and  stress  passed. 
The  champions  of  individual  freedom  saw 
their  theories  tried  in  the  French  Revolu- 
tion; and  the  results  of  that  trial  made  the 
older  and  cooler  heads  among  them  ready 
to  go  back  at  least  part  way  to  the  old  rule 
of  social  conventions.  Not  that  the  voices 
which  asserted  the  right  to  individual 
freedom  and  Individual  development  were 
ever  wholly  stilled.  The  whole  system  of 
German  transcendental  philosophy  was 
based  upon  the  Idea  of  the  Importance  of 
the  ego.    And  there  were  In  every  genera- 

86 


RECENT  POETRY 

tion,  from  Fichte  at  the  beginning  of  the 
nineteenth  century  to  Nietzsche  at  the  end 
of  it,  philosophers  who  preached  the  right 
of  individual  development  in  no  uncertain 
terms.  But  for  a  long  time  they  had 
slight  influence  on  general  literature  and 
on  the  general  thought  of  the  men  who 
were  doing  the  world's  work.  Schiller's 
later  dramas  show  a  return  to  conventional 
types.  The  Faust  of  Goethe,  as  he  took 
It  up  and  developed  it  In  his  maturer  years, 
Is  a  wholly  different  conception  from  the 
Faust  of  the  fragment.  The  new  Faust 
still  desires  to  widen  his  experience  and  to 
take  within  himself  whatever  of  life  the 
world  has  to  provide;  but  his  note  toward 
the  world  and  Its  spirit  Is  no  longer  the 
bold  note  of  challenge  or  defiance.  It  Is 
the  somewhat  weary  note  of  a  man  who 
feels  that  he  has  much  to  learn  and  rela- 
tively little  satisfaction  In  learning  It. 
The   poetry   of   the   early   part   of  the 

87 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

nineteenth    century,    whatever    its    merits, 
makes    no    pretense    of    summoning    the 
reader  to  vigorous  action  as  a  man.     It  is 
predominantly   of  the    romantic   school — 
the  school  which  seeks  its  golden  age  in 
the  past   and  which  tries  to  take  refuge 
from  the  evils  of  today  in  the  contempla- 
tion   of    other    and    better    things.      The 
results  of  the  French  Revolution  had  dis- 
couraged people  from  preaching  the  doc- 
trines on  which  that  Revolution  had  been 
based.      A   poet    like    Wordsworth,    who 
loves  liberty,   withdraws  from  the  world 
of  action  into  that  of  contemplation.     A 
poet  like  Scott,  who  cares  for  the  world 
of  action  and  is  not  willing  to  withdraw 
from  it,   describes  the  ideals  and  aspira- 
tions of  ages  which  had  less  liberty  than 
we  have  today.     Neither  Wordsworth  nor 
Scott  has  a  definite  message  to  the  fighting 
men  of  the  present.     Wordsworth's  mes- 
sage is  to  the  men  of  the  present  who  are 

88 


RECENT  POETRY 

not   fighting,    Scott's   to   the   fighting  men 
who  are  not  of  the  present. 

As  always  happens  in  such  cases,  the 
form  of  the  poetry  began  to  count  for 
more  and  more,  the  substance  for  less  and 
less.  Poems,  and  to  a  less  extent  prose 
works,  became  masterpieces  of  literary 
art  rather  than  bearers  of  a  message. 
Southey,  Byron,  Moore,  Shelley,  Keats — 
where  can  you  find  a  similar  group  of 
authors  who  wrote  so  much  that  was  so 
good  and  yet  left  to  the  generation  after 
them  so  little  except  a  row  of  pictures  on 
a  wall?  Nowhere  unless  it  be  the  group 
of  English  novelists  of  a  few  years  later — 
Bulwer,  Dickens,  Trollope,  Thackeray. 
Small  wonder  that  the  Englishmen  of  the 
forties  and  the  fifties  who  wished  to  make 
their  reading  a  basis  of  action  instead  of 
a  mere  diversion  grasped  at  the  outspoken 
traditionalism  of  a  Newman  or  of  a 
Ruskin,  who  had  something  of  vital  con- 

89 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

cern  in  his  heart!  The  message  of  a  man 
like  Newman  or  Ruskin  might  be  right  or 
it  might  be  wrong;  but  it  was  in  any  event 
the  word  of  some  one  who  beheved  that 
God  had  given  him  something  to  preach 
to  his  fellow  men.  Therefore  did  men 
listen,  and  therefore  did  they  feel  bitter 
disappointment  when  they  found  that  what 
Newman  said  and  what  Ruskin  said  did 
not  in  fact  meet  the  needs  of  the  age  to 
which  they  preached.  On  the  Continent 
of  Europe,  the  "Young  Hegelians"  were 
addressing  themselves  vigorously  to  pres- 
ent-day problems;  and  for  the  time  being 
their  writings  took  powerful  hold  of  the 
thought  of  Germany.  But  only  faint 
echoes  of  this  movement  reached  England. 
Yet  there  was  one  great  English  poet 
of  that  day  who  had  a  message  which  did 
meet  the  needs  of  the  age.  This  was 
Robert  Browning.     More  fortunate  than 

Newman  or  Ruskin,  his  face  was  turned 

90 


RECENT  POETRY 

toward  the  future  instead  of  the  past.  He 
did  not  tell  people  that  because  the  night 
was  dark  they  must  try  to  console  them- 
selves by  the  recollections  of  yesterday. 
He  helped  them  to  prepare  for  tomorrow 
as  best  they  could.  It  was  because  he  bore 
such  a  message  and  proffered  real  help  to 
men  who  were  trying  to  solve  perplexing 
questions  .  that  he  had  power  to  make 
strong  men  listen  to  him,  instead  of  to 
Swinburne  or  Morris  or  even  Tennyson, 
who  had  the  lyric  form  but  had  not  the 
intellectual  or  emotional  substance  which 
people  were  craving. 

Browning  speaks  to  men  who  are  trying 
to  work  out  the  problems  of  liberty.  His 
poetry  always,  even  at  its  worst,  contains 
thoughts  that  help  toward  this  end;  and 
his  better  poems  are  written  in  such  a  way 
that  they  stimulate  the  emotions  as  well 
as  the  thoughts  which  are  needed  in  the 

citizens  of  a  free  commonwealth.      I  say 

91 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

his  better  poems;  for  Browning,  though 
fairly  consistent  as  a  thinker,  Is  as  a  writer 
of  English  literature  more  unequal  In  his 
different  works  than  anybody  since  John 
Bunyan. 

Browning's  philosophy  of  life  was  fairly 
outlined,  though  not  fully  developed,  In 
1835.  In  his  Paracelsus,  published  In  that 
year,  he  pictures  the  thoughts  of  a  man 
bent  on  realizing  what  there  was  In  him- 
self and  on  giving  others  the  opportunity 
to  realize  what  there  was  In  them;  first 
admired,  then  hated,  but  always  living, 
always  going  forward,  and  never  so  wholly 
triumphant  as  when  he  dies  outcast  by  his 
fellows.  Browning  has  gone  back  to 
Blake's  conception  of  vitality  as  a  thing 
essentially  right  and  essentially  necessary; 
but  he  avoids  Blake's  error  of  linking  the 
name  of  God  with  the  spirit  of  repression, 
and  making  him  the  God  of  only  half  the 
world.  Instead  of  the  whole.     God  is  not 

92 


RECENT  POETRY 

the  God  of  conventions,  though  conven- 
tions may  be  necessary;  he  is  not  the  God 
of  the  dead  but  of  the  Hving.  "I  have 
Hved,"  says  Paracelsus,  when  scoffing  at 
the  idea  that  God  requires  "Pardon  of  him 
because  of  praise  denied";  "We  only  have 
to  live  to  set  forth  God's  praise."  But  the 
living  must  be  something  positive;  not  a 
mere  impatience  of  restraint;  not  the  petty 
law-breaking  which  constituted  Shelley's 
idea  of  what  living  meant,  nor  the  middle- 
sized  law-breaking  which  pleases  Bernard 
Shaw,  nor  even  the  gigantic  law-breaking 
which  Byron  and  afterward  Swinburne 
liked  to  imagine;  but  the  living  out  a  life 
in  which  the  aim  for  power  goes  hand  in 
hand  with  the  love  of  one's  fellow  men, 
and  in  which  the  disregard  of  laws  and 
conventions  is  only  the  bursting  of  the  husk 
when  the  seed  develops  into  the  plant. 

To    Blake    the    struggle    between    indi- 
vidual  vitality   and  the    conventions   that 

93 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

repress  it  was  necessarily  a  struggle 
between  two  antagonistic  principles — just 
as  it  is  to  Bernard  Shaw  at  the  present 
day.  Browning  took  a  saner  and,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  a  truer  view  of  the  nature 
of  the  conflict.  There  are  certain  things 
which  the  individual  does  to  work  out  his 
own  destiny.  There  are  other  things 
which  organized  society  does  to  work  out 
its  own  safety  and  permanence  as  an 
organization.  An  entire  repression  of  the 
individual  means  stagnation;  an  entire  dis- 
regard of  social  conventions  in  behalf  of 
the  individual  means  anarchy.  Somewhere 
between  the  two  we  are  bound  to  find 
a  way  of  right  living;  not  as  a  result  of  a 
balance  between  opposing  forces,  but  as  a 
point  where  the  needs  both  of  the  indi- 
vidual and  of  society  may  be  realized  con- 
currently. The  repression  of  the  indi- 
vidual is  not  the  end  of  the  law.     It  is  an 

incident — an  undesirable  incident  but  often 

94 


RECENT  POETRY 

a  necessary  one.  Browning  saw  both  sides 
of  this  issue  as  few  poets,  or,  for  the 
matter  of  that,  few  living  men,  have  ever 
been  able  to  see  both  sides  of  any  issue. 
In  Bishop  Blougram's  Apology,  intellect- 
ually one  of  the  most  remarkable  poems 
of  the  century,  he  gives  us  an  illuminating 
discussion,  between  a  Catholic  priest  and 
a  literary  free  lance,  concerning  liberty  of 
thought  and  the  propriety  of  suppressing 
one's  own  individual  convictions  for  the 
sake  of  an  ulterior  end  to  be  obtained. 
Every  man  who  reads  this  poem  atten- 
tively will  understand  many  fundamental 
things  in  life  better  than  he  did  before. 
An  even  more  varied  insight  is  shown  in 
The  Ring  and  The  Book,  where  the  his- 
tory of  certain  dark  transactions  is  set 
forth  as  it  looks  from  different  stand- 
points— the  injurer  and  the  injured,  the 
lawyer  and  the  man  who  breaks  the  law 
from  a  desire  to  do  right,  with  the  pope's 

95 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

own  summation  of  the  complexity  of  the 

whole  and  the  mixed  Tightness  and  wrong- 

ness    of    the    different    parts.       For    the 

struggle  of  life  with  which  we  have  to  deal 

is  nothing  so  simple  as  a  struggle  between 

marshalled  forces  of  vitality  on  one  side 

and  of  repression  on  the  other.     It  is  a 

struggle   where   the   vitality   of   one   man 

craves  for  the   restriction  and  repression 

of   others;    where    we    must    balance    the 

claims  and  demands  of  different  kinds  of 

men  and  women  and  the  value  of  different 

kinds  of  social  order.     The  poetry  which 

the  man  of  action  in  the  twentieth  century 

demands  is  poetry  which  will  help  him  to 

understand  his  place  in  that  struggle  and 

inspire  him  to   accept  its  burdens.      It  is 

because  Browning  does  this  that  men  read 

Browning  when  they  are  ceasing  to  read 

men  among  his  contemporaries  who  were 

greater  literary  artists  and  greater  masters 

of  poetic  style. 

96 


RECENT  POETRY 

But  how  shall  good  and  evil  be  deter- 
mined when  there  Is  no  pope  to  weigh  the 
motives?      If    Newman    and    Ruskln    are 
wrong  In  telling  us  to   be  guided  by  the 
past,  where  shall  a  guide  be  found?    These 
were  questions  which  poets  and  novelists 
of   the   middle   of  the   last   century   were 
vainly  trying  to  solve.    The  voice  of  com- 
placency which  had  characterized  the  Hter- 
ature  of  the  generation  earlier  had  given 
place  to   the   voice   of  protest.       Carlyle, 
KIngsley,   the   Brontes,   George   Eliot,   all 
in    their    several    ways,    were    expressing 
cravings  which  the  past  had  not  satisfied 
and    asking  questions    to   which    tradition 
furnished  no   answer.      Browning  showed 
us  how  to  find  the  answer  in  many  particu- 
lar cases;  to  the  question  in  Its  broad  form 
even  Browning  did  not  give,  or  attempt  to 
give,  a  general  answer. 

The   present    generation   thinks   It   has 
found  the  way  In  which  this  answer  Is  to 

97 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

be  reached.  The  contest  between  man  and 
man  or  between  system  and  system  is  not 
a  purposeless  agency  of  destruction.  It  is 
the  means  of  proving  which  is  the  better 
man  or  which  the  better  system.  Where 
previous  generations  said,  "Right  must 
prevail  in  the  long  run,"  and  held  it  as  a 
somewhat  dim  article  of  religious  faith, 
the  present  generation  sets  out  to  discover 
what  is  going  to  prevail  in  the  long  run, 
in  the  full  confidence  that  if  this  can  be 
found  it  will  be  right.  And  meantime, 
while  it  strives  to  regulate  struggles  and 
wars,  it  nevertheless  accepts  them,  and  to 
some  degree  glorifies  them,  as  a  means  of 
proving  all  things  that  we  may  hold  fast 
that  which  is  good. 

"  Good  luck  to  those  who  see  the  end ! 
Good-bye  to  those  that  drown! 
To  each  his  chance,  as  chance  shall  send, 
And  God  for  all!    Shut  down!" 


98 


RECENT  POETRY 

That  verse  summarizes  the  theology  of  a 
large  part  of  the  church  militant  as  It 
exists  today. 

But,  you  will  ask,  what  Is  meant  by 
characterizing  this  as  a  spiritual  phil- 
osophy, or  as  a  true  philosophy  of  any 
kind?  Is  It  not  rather  a  glorification  of 
brute  force?  If  it  be  true  that  men  feel 
thus  and  think  thus.  Is  It  not  a  deplorable 
fact,  full  of  danger  for  the  future,  rather 
than  a  source  of  spiritual  hope  and 
promise?  Do  not  these  doctrines  nor- 
mally result  in  an  animalism  like  that  of 
D'AnnunzIo  or  a  cynicism  like  that  of 
Bernard  Shaw,  rather  than  in  zeal  for 
moral  truth  and  in  high  ideals  of  what  the 
human  race  can  be  and  ought  to  be? 

This  is  a  fair  question,  which  needs  to 
be  squarely  answered. 

If  we  encourage  people  to  follow  out 
their  own  impulses,  in  the  belief  that  time 
will   show  which   Impulses   are   good   and 

99 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

v/hlch  impulses  are  bad,  men  of  strong 
animal  instincts,  with  little  judgment,  will 
be  tempted  to  pursue  careers  of  lust  or 
cruelty;  and  writers  like  D'Annunzio,  who 
have  strong  passions  and  little  self-control, 
will  preach  the  doctrine  that  this  exer- 
cise of  liberty  is  the  normal  conduct  of 
humanity — a  sign  of  strength  rather  than 
of  weakness.  But  this  kind  of  career 
brings  its  own  ruin;  and  this  kind  of  litera- 
ture carries  with  it  its  own  refutation. 
The  men  who  follow  their  passions  find 
that  they  have  taken  the  road  to  self- 
destruction,  not  the  road  to  power.  The 
men  who  have  preached  the  gospel  of 
animalism  find  that  it  is  a  gospel  of  deca- 
dence, not  of  life.  If  such  a  writer  has  eyes 
to  see  and  a  heart  to  feel,  he  gradually 
discovers  the  error  of  what  he  has  done. 
The  Zola  of  UAssommoir  and  Nana  gives 
place  to  the  Zola  of  La  Debacle.  The 
writer  who  began  by  dwelling  on  corrup- 

100 


RECENT  POETRY 

tion  with  an  apparent  love  of  the  corrupt, 
has  ended  by  grasping,  as  few  other  men 
have  grasped  it,  the  lesson  that  moral 
corruption  leads  to  the  downfall  of  a 
people. 

Again,  the  man  of  mere  intellectual 
power,  without  strong  human  sympathies, 
may  take  this  doctrine  as  an  encourage- 
ment to  treat  life  as  a  game,  in  Avhich  it 
is  his  sole  duty  to  use  his  intelligence  to 
win.  And  a  writer  of  this  temperament 
may  take  pleasure  in  analyzing  life  in  this 
spirit,  to  the  detriment  of  all  serious  pur- 
pose and  serious  feeling.  This  danger  is 
more  real  than  the  other,  because  the  un- 
sympathetic man  frequently  gets  a  consid- 
erable measure  of  success  and  power,  and 
the  unsympathetic  writer  may  continue 
writing  for  a  long  time  before  anything 
happens  to  disprove  his  views.  Yet  even 
with  men  of  this  type,  the  attempt  to 
follow  out  consequences  honestly  and  write 

101 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

Stories  truthfully  gradually  leads  to  higher 
instead  of  lower  views  of  life.  The  early 
dramas  of  Bernard  Shaw  contained  much 
amusing  cynicism  and  little  suggestion  of 
anything  better.  In  Man  and  Superman 
the  cynicism  has  become,  almost  in  spite 
of  itself,  a  vehicle  for  conveying  spiritual 
truth,  none  the  less  profound  because  of 
its  unconventional  or  irreverent  form.  I 
know  of  nothing  more  striking  in  the  way 
of  philosophic  preaching  than  in  Satan's 
suggestion  to  the  pious  lady  who  has  unex- 
pectedly found  herself  in  hell,  that  she 
should  go  to  heaven  and  try  living  there  for 
a  while  in  order  that  she  may  see  how 
uncomfortable  she  would  be  in  such  a 
place.  When  she  asks  with  surprise 
whether  she  would  be  allowed  to  go  and 
try,  she  is  told  that  the  only  reason  why 
anybody  ever  stays  in  hell  is  because  hell 
is  the  only  place  for  which  they  feel  them- 
selves   suited.      And    when    she    inquires 

102 


RECENT  POETRY 

whether  a  great  many  souls  do  not  stay 
in  heaven  a  long  time  before  they  have 
found  out  their  mistake,  there  is  a  terrible 
touch  of  truth  as  well  as  irony  in  Satan's 
answer,  so  characteristic  of  Bernard  Shaw, 
that  they  are  chiefly  English  souls  who 
have  been  brought  up  to  think  that  they 
were  moral  when  they  were  only  uncom- 
fortable. The  same  evolution  is  seen  in 
the  case  of  one  greater  than  Bernard  Shaw, 
Ibsen.  If  ever  there  was  a  man  whose 
genius  was  predominantly  intellectual  and 
whose  passion  was  a  passion  for  analysis, 
it  was  Henrik  Ibsen.  There  was  a  time 
when  people  thought  that  his  dramas 
undermined  faith  in  humanity.  We  now 
see  that  what  they  chiefly  undermined  was 
our  faith  in  shams;  and  that  pitiless  expo- 
sition of  the  consequences  of  what  is  weak 
in  modern  life  may  serve  as  a  sure  means 
to  help  us  in  deciding  upon  what  we  can 
hold  to  as  really  strong. 

103 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

For  after  all  the  lesson  which  observa- 
tion teaches  to  the  man  of  brains  is  the 
same  that  instinct  has  taught  the  gentle- 
man for  many  ages  past:  that  in  any  con- 
flict which  is  worthy  of  the  name  strength 
counts  for  less  than  intelligence,  intelli- 
gence for  less  than  discipline,  discipline  for 
less  than  self-sacrifice;  or,  to  put  it  in  posi- 
tive words,  that  unswerving  devotion  is 
the  thing  that  counts  for  most  of  all.  The 
grim  wager  of  battle  is,  as  Carlyle  says, 
full  of  glorious  possibilities  of  life.  Con- 
flict is  above  and  beyond  all  else  a  test  of 
loyalty.  The  more  complex  the  struggle, 
the  more  does  the  power  to  stand  this  test 
come  into  the  foreground  as  the  decisive 
element.  This  fact  it  is,  more  than  all 
others,  which  makes  the  modern  philoso- 
phy of  conflict  deserve  the  title  of  a  spirit- 
ual philosophy.  It  is  because  our  D'An- 
nunzios  and  our  Shaws  fail  to  recognize 
this   that   they   fall   short   of   intellectual 

104 


RECENT  POETRY 

greatness.     It  is  because   our   Brownings 

and  our  Kiplings  recognize  this  fact  that 

they  achieve  a  permanent  hold  on  mankind. 

If    there    Is    one    message    more    than 

another  with  which  modern  EngHsh  poetry 

Is  charged,  it  is  this  message  of  enduring 

loyally. 

"  To  see  a  good  in  evil,  and  a  hope 
In  ill  success" 

is  Browning's  text. 

"  Say  not,  'The  struggle  naught  availeth, 
The  labor  and  the  wounds  are  vain; 
The  enemy  faints  not,  nor  faileth. 
And  as  things  have  been  they  remain.' 

"  If  hopes  were  dupes,  fears  may  be  liars; 
It  may  be  through  yon  smoke  concealed 
Your  comrades  chase  even  now  the  flyers, 
And  but  for  you  possess  the  field," 

sings  Clough,  a  forerunner  of  the  modern 
school  of  poetry,  taken  away  from  us, 
unfortunately,  before  the  time  of  his  full 
fruition.  It  Is  the  Inspiration  of  this  mes- 
sage that  lights  up  the  bare  rafters  of  the 

105 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

mess  room  of  the  cholera-stricken  officers 
in  Ceylon: 

"  So  stand  to  your  glasses  steady, 
For  this  a  world  of  lies ; 
Here's  a  glass  to  the  dead  already 
And  here's  to  the  next  that  dies!" 

It  is  this  spirit  that  breathes  through  every 
line  of  Henley,  and  with  which  the  poetry 
of  Rudyard  Kipling  is  so  charged  and  sur- 
charged that  if  I  once  began  quoting  from 
him  I  know  not  where  I  should  stop. 

"He  that  shall  endure  to  the  end,  the 
same  shall  be  saved."  This  is  one  of  the 
great  spiritual  lessons  of  the  militant 
school  of  poetry.  And  side  by  side  with 
this  there  is  another  lesson,  or  group  of 
lessons,  equally  important :  the  lesson  of 
tolerance  and  of  reverence. 

If  a  man  works  out  his  philosophy  of 
life  by  himself  or  with  his  books  as  his 
only   companions,    it  is   hard   for   him   to 

106 


RECENT  POETRY 

avoid  a  good  deal  of  injustice  toward 
people  whose  convictions  are  different 
from  his  own.  He  may  not  always  judge 
the  past  as  the  man  did  who  started  with 
the  doctrine  that  whatever  is  is  right,  and 
drew  the  conclusion  that  whatever  was  was 
wrong.  Nor  will  he  always  go  to  the  same 
lengths  as  the  Presbyterian  divine  who 
published  a  book  in  which  he  summarized 
the  result  of  his  reasonings  under  the  title 
"The  Final  Philosophy."  But  the  mode 
in  which  he  has  arrived  at  his  convictions 
will  make  it,  to  say  the  least,  very  difficult 
for  him  to  understand  how  any  man  of 
sense  and  honesty  could  ever  have  arrived 
at  different  ones.  The  man  who  has  really 
had  the  chance  to  compare  his  views  with 
other  men's  views  will  look  at  things  in  a 
broader  way.  Though  his  own  feelings 
may  be  intense,  he  will  know  that  other 
men  are  equally  honest  when  they  hold 
other  views  and  feel  other  emotions.    The 

107 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

very  fact  that  he  is  willing  to  put  his  ideas 
to  the  test  of  conflict  means  that  he  is 
ready  to  give  fair  play  to  other  men's 
ideas.  If  the  things  which  were  of  use  to 
a  past  generation  are  different  from  those 
that  he  thinks  the  present  needs,  he  does 
not  on  that  account  despise  them  or  brand 
them  as  fictions.  If  he  is  a  man  of  any 
largeness  of  vision,  he  sees  that  the  phi- 
losophy of  the  future  will  grow  beyond 
what  the  present  can  conceive,  just  as  the 
best  conceptions  of  the  present  have  grown 
beyond  the  possibilities  of  the  past.  He 
is  content  to  let  each  man  get  at  the  right 
in  his  own  way  and  use  the  forms  of 
thought  which  help  him  most.  What 
matter  is  it  if  MacAndrew's  God  be  the 
result  of  a  mixture  of  Calvinistic  theology 
with  the  principles  of  steam  engineering, 
while  the  Lama's  God  is  the  result  of 
lonely  meditation  among  the  snow  moun- 
tains    concerning    impossible     stories     of 

108 


RECENT  POETRY 

Buddha?  If  God  under  these  forms,  or 
any  other  forms,  can  make  engineers  like 
MacAndrew  and  priests  like  the  Lama 
and  help  them  to  know,  as  each  knew  in 
his  way,  the  real  sizes  and  values  of  the 
different  parts  of  life,  let  us  accept  the 
result  and  be  thankful  that  men  have 
reached  it  by  the  roads  that  best  suited 
their  several  feet. 

"  How  can  I  turn  from  any  fire 
On  any  man's  hearthstone? 
I  know  the  longing  and  desire 
That  went  to  build  my  own !" 

A  tolerance  like  this  has  nothing  in 
common  with  the  indifference  of  the  man 
who  plays  with  his  convictions.  It  repre- 
sents rather  the  seriousness  of  the  man 
who  values  the  essential  part  of  his  faith 
all  the  more  because  he  feels  how  much 
greater  is  the  reality  for  which  he  is 
striving  than  the  imperfect  representation 

109 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

of  it  which  he  already  has  achieved.  For 
the  poet  of  today,  like  the  Hebrew  poets 
of  old,  is  essentially  a  prophet — the  bearer 
of  a  progressive  revelation;  one  of  a  his- 
toric chain  of  seers,  feeling  after  God  if 
haply  they  may  find  him,  and  each  in  his 
own  way  bringing  men  a  little  nearer  to 
the  truth. 

"  When   I  was  a  king  and  a  mason,  a  master 

proven  and  skilled, 
I  planned  to  build  me  a  palace  such  as  a  king 

should  build. 
I  decreed  and   dug  down   to  my  levels;  and, 

buried  under  the  silt, 
I  came  on  the  wreck  of  a  palace  such  as  a  king 

had  built. 

*'  There  was  no  wit  in  the  fashion,  there  was  no 

worth  in  the  plan ; 
Hither  and  thither,  aimless,  the  ruined  footings 

ran; 
Masonry    brute,    mishandled,    yet    graven    on 

every  stone 
'After  me  cometh   a  builder;  tell  him,   I   too 

have  known.' 

no 


RECENT  POETRY 


"  Swift  to  my  use  in  the  trenches  where  my  well- 
planned  groundworks  grew 

I  tumbled  his  quoins  and  his  ashlars,  I  cut  and 
reset  them  anew. 

Lime  I  had  from  his  marbles,  burned  it,  slaked 
it,  and  spread, 

Taking  or  leaving  at  pleasure  the  gifts  of  the 
humble  dead. 

"  Yet    I    despised    not    or    gloried ;    yet    as    we 
wrenched  them  apart 
I  read  in  the  razed  foundations  the  heart  of 

that  builder's  heart. 
As  he  had  risen  and  pleaded,  so  did  I  under- 
stand 
The  form  of  the  dream  he  had  followed  by  the 
face  of  the  thing  he  had  planned. 

"  When  I  was  a  king  and  a  mason,  in  the  open 

noon  of  my  pride 
They  sent  me  a  word  from  the  darkness ;  they 

whispered  and  called  me  aside. 
They  said,  'The  end  is  forbidden' ;  they  said, 

'Thy  use  is  fulfilled ; 
Thy  work  shall  be  as  the  other's,  the  spoil  of  a 

king  that  shall  build.' 


Ill 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 


"  I  called  my  men  from  my  trenches,  my  quar- 
ries, my  wharves,  and  my  sheers ; 

All  I  had  wrought  I  abandoned  to  the  faith  of 
the  faithless  years; 

Only  I  carved  on  the  timber,  only  I  wrought 
in  the  stone 

After  me  cometh  a  builder.  Tell  him,  I  too 
have  known/" 


112 


APPENDIX  I 

ON  THE  MEANING  OF  THE  TERM 
PHILOSOPHY 

WHEN  these  lectures  were  delivered 
I  was  asked  by  two  or  three  per- 
sons what  the  word  philosophy  really 
meant.  This  is  a  much  easier  question  to 
ask  than  to  answer.  A  study  of  the 
definitions  and  the  illustrative  passages 
given  in  the  Oxford  Dictionary  leads  one 
to  the  conclusion  that  the  English  word 
philosophy  can  be  used  in  as  many  different 
senses  as  Mark  Twain  found  for  the 
elusive  German  word  Zti^;  which,  as  he 
truthfully  remarked,  could  mean  anything 
from  a  bank  check  to  a  railroad  train. 
Under  such  circumstances  each  man  may, 
within  certain  broad  limits,  choose  his  own 
definition.     A  philosophy,  as  I  understand 

113 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

It,  Is  a  set  of  working  hypotheses  which  a 
man  adopts  In  order  to  harmonize,  as 
far  as  may  be,  his  prejudices  with  his 
experience. 

There  are  certain  ideas  or  prejudices 
which  we  accept  without  proof  and  take 
as  starting  points  in  our  own  reasoning. 
It  is  in  this  manner  that  we  assume  our 
own  existence,  the  existence  of  other 
people  like  ourselves,  the  reaHty  of  an 
external  world  of  some  kind,  and  an  under- 
lying orderliness  in  the  events  of  that 
world.  None  of  these  things  is  capable 
of  proof,  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the 
term.  The  Cog'ito  ergo  sum  of  Descartes 
does  not  represent  the  real  reason  for 
believing  In  a  man's  own  existence.  It  is 
simply  a  means  of  making  a  belief  which 
we  already  possess  appear  logically  plau- 
sible. I  know  of  no  better  name  by  which 
to  call  these  assumptions  than  the  old  and 

somewhat  abused  term  Innate  ideas.    They 

114 


MEANING  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

are  based  on  inherited  habits  of  action  and 
thought,  which  have  lasted  throughout  so 
many  generations  that  they  have  become 
unconscious  if  not  instinctive.  They  repre- 
sent prejudices  rather  than  reasoned  judg- 
ments regarding  the  universe;  and  they 
exempHfy  in  a  striking  degree  that  supe- 
riority of  prejudice  over  reason  which 
Burke  so  cogently  set  forth. 

Side  by  side  with  these  innate  ideas  or 
prejudices  there  gradually  come  into  our 
lives  other  ideas  which  we  acquire  con- 
sciously as  the  result  of  teaching  and 
observation.  Our  own  experience  of 
everyday  life  and  the  truths  of  history 
and  science  which  we  learn  from  others 
supplement  our  preconceived  notions  of 
the  universe,  and  as  we  grow  older  begin 
to  conflict  with  them.  Out  of  this  conflict 
comes  a  readjustment  of  our  prejudices. 
No  man,  however  strong  his  innate  ideas, 
holds  them  in  quite  the  same  form  at  thirty 

115 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

that  he  did  at  fifteen.  But  though  men 
modify  their  preconceptions  they  never 
reject  them.  However  much  a  man  may 
become  imbued  with  the  facts  of  physics, 
he  puts  them  in  a  framework  of  meta- 
physics of  his  own. 

What  holds  true  of  an  individual  holds 
true  of  a  community.  A  tribe  starts  with 
certain  underlying  ideas  regarding  the  uni- 
verse, usually  expressed  in  the  form  of  a 
rehgious  creed.  As  the  tribe  grows  into 
a  nation  its  beliefs  are  modified  by  the 
events  with  which  it  comes  in  contact  and 
its  creeds  are  readjusted  in  the  light  of 
experience.  The  generation  of  Aeschylus 
had  learned  some  things  which  prevented 
the  creed  of  Homer  from  satisfying  it. 
The  generation  of  Aristotle  had  learned 
some  things  which  prevented  the  creed  of 
Aeschylus  from  satisfying  it.  There  is  a 
constant  change  in  the  kind  of  philosophy 
that  meets  a  people's  demands.    The  popu- 

116 


MEANING  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

lar  belief  and  prejudice  of  early  times  is 
like  the  system  of  the  universe  which 
presents  itself  to  the  mind  of  a  child — 
based  much  on  dreams  and  little  on  facts. 
The  fully  developed  philosophy  of  a  later 
day  has  discarded  part,  but  never  the 
whole,  of  the  dream. 

The  attempt  to  get  a  system  of  work- 
ing hypotheses  which  shall  satisfy  our 
instincts  without  conflicting  with  our  expe- 
rience is  the  most  difficult  problem  which 
logic  presents.  For  we  are  not  trying  to 
compare  the  validity  of  two  similar  kinds 
of  proof,  or  even  the  results  of  two  dif- 
ferent kinds  of  evidence.  We  are  adjust- 
ing a  set  of  formulas  derived  from  the 
inherited  experience  of  the  race  to  the 
limitations  set  by  the  acquired  experience 
of  the  individual.  The  process  of  achiev- 
ing this  result  is  philosophy.  The  result, 
when  we  get  it,  is  a  philosophy — good  or 
bad,  as  the  case  may  be. 

117 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

It  has  become  a  habit  in  modern  times, 
particularly  in  the  United  States,  to  use 
the  word  philosophy  in  a  somewhat  nar- 
rower sense;  to  treat  it  as  a  branch  of 
psychology,  or  as  being  at  any  rate  subject- 
matter  for  the  professed  psychologist 
rather  than  for  the  man  of  letters  or  man 
of  affairs.  It  is  quite  admissible  to  use 
the  term  in  this  sense  if  we  so  desire. 
Every  event  is  essentially  an  impression 
made  upon  us  by  something  external  to 
ourselves.  The  study  of  the  external 
world  is  the  work  of  physical  science.  The 
study  of  the  impressions  we  are  receiving 
from  that  world  constitutes  an  important 
part  of  the  work  of  psychology.  There  is 
a  tendency  to  confine  the  name  philosophy 
to  the  conclusions  derived  from  this  study 
of  mental  impressions;  and  that  tendency 
has  acquired  much  force  at  the  present 
day  because  two  or  three  eminent  psycholo- 
gists, notably  Herbert  Spencer  and  Wil- 
lis 


MEANLNG  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

Ham  James,  have  developed  brilliant  phi- 
losophies of  life  which  are  based  upon  the 
study  of  psychology  and  which  ignore,  if 
they  do  not  defy,  the  dictates  of  logical 
convention.  But  the  majority  of  men  who 
have  helped  to  formulate  the  thought  of 
the  world  regarding  the  relation  between 
its  instincts  and  its  experience  have  been 
logicians  rather  than  psychologists.  The 
great  names  in  the  history  of  phi- 
losophy during  past  ages — Plato,  Aristotle, 
Aquinas,  Descartes,  Spinoza,  Kant — have 
all  been  primarily  logicians.  Their  work 
as  psychologists  has  been  incidental.  With 
one  or  two,  like  Plato  or  perhaps  Spinoza, 
psychology  has  been  a  highly  important 
and  useful  incident  of  their  studies;  with 
the  others  it  has  been  a  secondary,  or  even 
(as  in  the  case  of  Descartes)  a  somewhat 
detrimental  incident. 

We  shall,  I  believe,  get  a  truer  concep- 
tion of  the  work  of  the  philosophic  think- 

119 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

ers  of  the  past  If  we  regard  the  problem 
as  a  logical  Instead  of  a  psychological 
one — based  on  a  study  of  evidence  rather 
than  on  a  study  of  mental  processes. 


120 


APPENDIX  II 

THE  INFLUENCE   OF  CHARLES  DAR- 
WIN ON  HISTORICAL  AND 
POLITICAL  SCIENCE 

^  I  ^HE     theories     of     Charles     Darwin 
■^     found  readier  and  prompter  accept- 
ance among  historians  than  among  biolo- 
gists. 

When  Darwin  presented  the  doctrine 
of  natural  selection  to  the  zoologists  and 
botanists  he  was  confronting  them  with  a 
new  set  of  scientific  ideas  and  conceptions. 
His  contemporaries  were  reluctant  to 
accept  these  new  ideas.  They  had  been 
brought  up  to  regard  different  species  as 
having  been  created  independently.  The 
idea  that  types  could  be  modified  by  slow 
process  of  change  was  something  foreign 
to   their   minds.      The   idea   that   existing 

121 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

types  simply  represented  the  result  of  suc- 
cessful experiment  in  a  field  where  the 
unsuccessful  experiments  had  been  elimi- 
nated by  death  was  still  more  novel  and 
repugnant.  It  was  not  until  the  genera- 
tion after  Darwin  that  his  fellow  biologists 
as  a  class  were  ready  to  abandon  the  idea 
of  special  acts  of  creation  for  specific  pur- 
poses and  to  search  instead  for  the  slow 
operation  of  natural  causes. 

In  history  and  in  politics  the  case  was 
different.  All  students  of  history  accepted 
the  idea  of  evolution  in  their  own  field  of 
special  study;  most  of  them  regarded  his- 
torical evolution  as  the  result  of  a  process 
of  natural  selection. 

Without  an  underlying  idea  of  evolu- 
tion human  history  is  a  meaningless  chron- 
icle, unworthy  of  the  attention  of  intelli- 
gent men.  If  different  historical  events 
were  independent  of  one  another  there 
would  be  no  sense  in  writing  history  at  all. 

122 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

All  serious  investigators  in  this  field,  from 
Thucydides  and  Aristotle  down  to  the 
present  time,  have  sought  either  to  develop 
the  details  of  this  orderly  and  gradual 
evolution  or  to  lay  down  the  principles  of 
its  operation.  The  man  who  today  reads 
the  Politics  of  Aristotle  for  the  first  time 
will  be  struck  by  the  prevalence  of  methods 
of  thought  which  many  biologists  suppose 
Darwin  to  have  invented.  And  the  same 
idea  of  evolution  thus  used  by  Aristotle  has 
been  applied  in  varying  forms  by  all  who 
sought  to  develop  a  philosophy  of  his- 
tory— by  Hegel  and  his  followers  in  Ger- 
many or  by  men  of  the  type  of  Henry 
Thomas  Buckle  in  England. 

Not  only  was  the  idea  of  evolution  thus 
familiar  to  the  historians;  the  idea  of  nat- 
ural selection  was  also  prominent  in  the 
minds  of  many  of  them.  The  whole  doc- 
trine of  John  Stuart  Mill  concerning  lib- 
erty   was    founded    upon    reliance    on    a 

123 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

process  of  natural  selection.  Look  for 
your  hero  in  all  possible  directions,  he  said, 
and  you  get  the  best  chance  of  finding  him. 
The  issue  between  Mill  and  Carlyle  re- 
minds one  of  the  controversies  between 
Darwinian  and  anti-Darwinian  in  the  field 
of  biology.  Carlyle  believed  in  the  special 
creation  of  a  number  of  individual  heroes; 
Mill,  together  with  nearly  all  scientifically 
trained  historians,  believed  in  the  evolution 
of  heroes  by  natural  selection. 

The  conception  of  economic  or  political 
conflict  as  a  means  of  determining  the  sur- 
vival of  the  fittest  was  seen  perhaps  even 
more  conspicuously  in  Malthus's  theory  of 
population — a  theory  which  Darwin  him- 
self regarded  as  having  in  some  respects 
foreshadowed  his  own  work.  Malthus 
based  his  whole  treatment  of  political 
economy  upon  the  doctrine  that  population 
tended  to  outrun  subsistence;  that  the 
struggle  for  existence  was  a  constant  pro- 

124 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

cess  of  elimination  of  the  weak;  and  that 
any  attempt  to  interfere  with  this  process 
resulted  rather  in  the  deterioration  than 
in  the  improvement  of  the  peoples  that  it 
was  designed  to  benefit. 

If  then  the  idea  of  evolution  had  been 
a  fundamental  one  in  historical  and  politi- 
cal science  for  more  than  two  thousand 
years,  and  if  the  idea  of  elimination  by 
natural  selection  was  by  no  means  unfa- 
miliar to  political  thinkers,  what  was  there 
left  for  the  followers  of  Darwin  to  do  in 
this  field? 

They  found  at  least  two  things  to  do. 
In  the  first  place,  they  showed  how  natural 
selection  was  a  means  of  developing,  not 
only  individuals  of  superior  ability  or  intel- 
ligence, but  types  of  superior  adaptation 
to  their  surroundings;  and  they  taught  us 
further  to  regard  this  adaptation  of  the 
type  to  its  surroundings  as  the  thing  which 
gave  it  its  right  to  exist. 

125 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

The  first  of  these  points  is  well  illus- 
trated by  the  history  of  the  Malthusian 
theory  before  and  after  Darwin.  Malthus 
and  almost  all  the  Malthusians  before  the 
time  of  Darwin  talked  of  an  actual  struggle 
for  food  between  different  individuals. 
They  thought  that  there  was  not  enough 
food  to  go  round,  and  that  this  fact  was  a 
direct  means  of  keeping  workers  up  to  a 
certain  standard  of  efficiency  and  prudence 
by  the  direct  elimination  of  the  weak. 
Today  we  see  that  the  result  is  far  more 
indirect  than  this.  There  is,  in  civilized 
communities  at  least,  no  habitual  scarcity 
of  food.  This  has  been  avoided  by  the 
development  of  certain  institutions  like  the 
family  and  private  property  and  certain 
motives  which  go  with  those  institutions 
which  prevent  the  scarcity  that  would 
otherwise  exist.  A  generation  ago  the 
critics  of  Malthus  thought  that  the  non- 
existence   of    the    scarcity   disproved    the 

126 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

Malthuslan  theory.  Today  we  see  that  It 
confirms  it.  It  shows  that  the  type  has 
adapted  itself  to  its  environment. 

It  is  the  institution  even  more  than  the 
man  that  has  been  marked  out  for  survival 
by  the  process  of  natural  selection.  We 
have  known  for  generations  how  elimina- 
tion affected  the  development  of  indi- 
viduals. It  was  Darwin  who  taught  us  to 
account  in  this  way  for  the  growth  of 
species — in  history  as  well  as  in  biology. 
And  in  thus  accounting  for  the  origin  and 
growth  of  institutions,  he  furnished  for  the 
first  time  an  objective  justification  of  the 
ethical  standards  and  motives  by  which 
those  institutions  were  upheld.  Every 
prominent  political  thinker  before  Darwin, 
with  the  one  notable  exception  of  Edmund 
Burke,  referred  historical  events  to  some 
preconceived  ethical  standard  of  his  own, 
and  judged  them  to  be  good  or  bad  accord- 
ing as  they  conformed  to  his  preconceived 

127 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

ideas.  This  is  true  even  of  a  man  like 
John  Stuart  Mill.  He  had  great  natural 
love  of  liberty,  and  was  essentially  tolerant 
in  his  disposition.  Yet  one  can  feel  in  all 
his  work  the  underlying  assumption  that 
the  chief  reason  for  approving  of  liberty 
is  its  effect  in  developing  the  type  of  char- 
acter represented  by  the  liberal  and  toler- 
ant Englishman  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
This  attitude  of  mind  was  a  great  help 
to  Mill  in  arranging  a  coherent  system  of 
political  economy;  and  as  long  as  he  ad- 
dressed an  audience  whose  general  views 
and  general  standards  were  like  his  own, 
it  enabled  him  to  appeal  to  them  with  great 
force.  But  the  instant  he  was  brought  face 
to  face  with  a  protectionist  like  Carey  or 
a  socialist  like  Lassalle,  what  had  pre- 
viously been  an  element  of  strength  became 
an  element  of  weakness.  There  was  no 
common  ground  from  which  to  reason, 
and   no   means    of   finding   any.      It   was 

128 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

Darwin  who  furnished  the  common 
ground.  It  was  Darwin  who  gave  the 
historians  and  poHtlcal  thinkers  the  pos- 
slblHty  of  reaching  objective  results  from 
their  discussion  which  were  previously 
unattainable.  You  like  one  kind  of  man 
and  one  kind  of  institution;  I  like  another 
kind  of  man  or  another  kind  of  institution. 
Very  well;  let  us  set  to  work  to  discover 
which,  in  the  long  run,  Is  going  to  prevail 
over  the  other.  That  which  will  prevail 
in  the  long  run  must  be  right.  This  Is  for 
the  historian  the  center  and  gist  of  Dar- 
winism. We  all  assumed  that  orderly 
evolution  existed;  we  most  of  us  under- 
stood a  good  deal  about  a  process  of  nat- 
ural selection  which  was  going  on.  But 
none  of  us  until  Darwin  came  had  learned 
to  take  the  results  of  natural  selection  as  a 
standard;  to  make  the  fact  of  permanence 
the  test  of  the  right  to  remain;  to  assume 
the  view  of  the  philosophical  pragmatlst 

129 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

in  dealing  with  the  problems  that  came 
before  us. 

Of  course  this  is  a  doctrine  that  needs 
to  be  appHed  with  great  care.  The  frank 
acceptance  of  survival  as  a  test  of  right  is 
attended  with  the  danger  that  we  may 
take  too  short  periods  of  history  under 
our  observation,  and  may  think  that  an 
idea  or  an  institution  has  won  the  race 
when  it  is  riding  most  hurriedly  toward  its 
downfall.  But  in  spite  of  all  these  dan- 
gers, the  necessity  of  applying  the  survival 
test  compels  the  man  who  is  naturally 
dogmatic  to  be  somewhat  less  so,  and  helps 
the  man  who  is  naturally  objective  to  be 
somewhat  more  so.  It  is  a  restraint  upon 
the  man  who  does  not  want  to  have  to 
prove  his  points;  it  is  an  assistance  to  the 
man  who  does. 

This  change  in  modes  of  thought  and 
criteria  of  ethics  did  not  come  suddenly. 
It  was  far  easier  for  popular  writers  to 

130 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

seize  upon  certain  results  of  Darwin's 
thinking  and  try  to  apply  them  to  history 
in  the  form  of  rhetorical  analogies  than 
it  was  to  get  at  the  Darwinian  habit  of 
mind  in  dealing  with  historical  problems 
in  general.  Herbert  Spencer's  writings 
furnish  a  very  marked  instance  of  this 
error.  Spencer's  style  was  so  felicitous 
and  his  works  were  so  widely  read  that  he 
did  a  good  deal  to  retard  the  application 
of  the  really  important  results  of  Darwin's 
work  to  political  thinking.  Spencer  and 
his  followers  made  much  of  the  conception 
of  society  as  an  organism;  but  they  over- 
looked the  fact  that  historians  had  been 
treating  society  as  an  organism  for  more 
than  two  thousand  years.  In  the  belief 
that  they  had  occupied  a  new  field,  they 
permitted  themselves  to  employ  a  number 
of  loose  analogies,  in  total  ignorance  of 
the  fact  that  competent  observers  had 
already  gone  over  much  of  the  ground  by 

131 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

scientific  methods.  Historians  had  been 
proving  which  forms  of  social  Ufe  did 
survive;  and  this  proof,  defective  or  un- 
certain as  it  was  in  many  instances,  was 
yet  better  than  the  guesses  of  the  Spen- 
cerian,  on  the  basis  of  remote  analogy,  as 
to  which  forms  of  social  life  were  going 
to  survive.  When  Spencer  pronounced 
evolution  good  or  bad  according  as  it  did 
or  did  not  "proceed  from  an  incoherent 
indefinite  homogeneity  to  a  coherent  defi- 
nite heterogeneity,"  he  was  writing  down 
in  large  letters  the  fact  that  he  was  born 
a  good  while  before  The  Origin  of  Species 
had  appeared.  He  had  put  on  a  few  of 
the  external  attributes  of  the  modern 
biologist;  that  was  all.  The  hands  were 
the  hands  of  Esau,  but  the  voice  was  the 
voice  of  Jacob.  Or,  to  take  an  instance 
from  a  different  field:  when  W.  K.  Clifford, 
in  his  now  almost  forgotten  Lectures  and 
Essays,  proclaimed  the  right  and  duty  of 

132 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

the  unlimited  exercise  of  private  judgment, 
and  called  down  anathemas  on  the  head 
of  every  man  who  wished  to  exercise  his 
own  private  judgment  to  the  extent  of  dif- 
fering from  Mr.  W.  K.  Clifford  in  this 
particular,  he  simply  showed  that  he  lived 
too  early  to  have  felt  the  full  effect  of  The 
Origin  of  Species  in  leading  people  to 
substitute  objective  criteria  for  subjective 
ones. 

But  it  would  perhaps  be  more  to  the  pur- 
pose to  give  instances  of  writers  who  were 
influenced  by  Darwin,  instead  of  those  who 
were  not. 

Among  English  economists,  the  man 
who  was  quicl<:est  to  feel  the  force  of  the 
new  movement  was  Walter  Bagehot. 
Bagehot's  Darwinian  ideas  are  popularly 
known  from  his  Physics  and  Politics — an 
interesting  and  often  exceedingly  brilliant 
set  of  conjectures  regarding  the  operation 
of   survival    in   prehistoric  periods.      But 

133 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

Bagehot's  main  work  and  main  interest 
were  always  in  the  nearer  parts  of  history, 
and  particularly  economic  history,  rather 
than  the  remoter  parts.  He  it  was  who, 
in  an  age  when  England  still  followed  John 
Stuart  Mill  blindly,  first  questioned  the 
general  admissibility  of  Mill's  assump- 
tions. In  these  twentieth  century  days, 
when  competition  is  regarded,  not  as  an 
axiom  or  postulate  of  political  economy, 
but  simply  as  an  important  incident  in  its 
development,  it  is  difficult  for  us  to  under- 
stand the  courage  that  was  involved  forty 
years  ago  in  publishing  two  critical  essays 
in  which  competition  was  regarded,  not  as 
a  standard  to  which  all  things  must  con- 
form, but  as  one  among  several  alternative 
phases  or  modes  of  social  service,  whose 
relative  claims  were  to  be  Investigated  and 
relative  merits  judged  by  their  applicability 
to  given  conditions.  In  this  mental  atti- 
tude the  English  writer  who  has  followed 

134 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

Bagehot  most  closely  is  W.  J.  Ashley, 
whose  English  Economic  History  may  be 
taken  as  furnishing  a  clear  exemplification 
of  Darwin's  influence  upon  the  methods 
of  modern  economic  thought. 

Meantime  a  German  investigator  In 
economics,  Adolph  Wagner  of  Berlin,  had 
been  taking  up  Darwinian  methods  on  a 
larger  scale  and  applying  them  with  con- 
spicuous success.  Wagner  may  be  said  to 
have  developed  his  Darwinism  at  the  oppo- 
site end  from  Bagehot.  Bagehot  had  been 
brought  up  in  the  methods  of  the  deductive 
school  of  economics,  and  was  impressed 
with  their  inapplicability;  Wagner  had 
been  accustomed  to  the  methods  of  the 
historical  school  of  economics,  and  was 
impressed  with  their  inconclusiveness. 
While  Bagehot  wanted  to  make  his  analy- 
sis broad  enough  to  fit  different  kinds  of 
facts,  Wagner  was  concerned  to  make  his 
synthesis  coherent  enough  to  bring  him  to 

135 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

some  positive  proofs  and  conclusions. 
Wagner's  treatment  of  the  theory  of 
property  right  Is  a  good  example  of  his 
philosophical  method.  He  rejects  both 
the  crude  juristic  theory  that  property 
right  is  based  upon  occupancy  and  the 
equally  crude  philosophic  theory  that  It 
ought  to  be  based  on  labor.  Society  has 
established  property  right  because  It  has 
shown  Itself  the  best  motive — in  fact, 
apparently  the  necessary  motive — In  order 
to  get  industry  well  and  efficiently  man- 
aged. It  Is  only  by  the  application  of  this 
last  theory  that  you  can  make  a  connection 
between  what  Is  and  what  ought  to  be; 
between  your  history  and  economics  on  the 
one  hand  and  your  law  and  ethics  on  the 
other.  If  the  philosopher  says  that  prop- 
erty ought  to  be  based  upon  labor,  the 
jurist  can  laugh  at  him.  If  the  jurist  says 
that  property  is  based  upon  occupancy  or 
upon  the  constitution  of  society,  the  phl- 

136 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

losopher  can  say  that  the  occupants  are  bad 
men  and  that  the  sooner  society  changes 
its  constitution  the  better.  But  if  property 
is  an  institution  which  has  survived  while 
other  forms  of  social  organization  have 
failed,  because  property  preserves  nations 
and  socialism  destroys  them,  then  socialism 
is  disproved  by  the  logic  of  events — the 
logic  that  Darwin  has  taught  us  to  apply 
to  problems  of  this  kind. 

It  is,  however,  not  so  much  in  its  special 
applications  that  the  Darwinian  theory  has 
affected  modern  political  science  as  in  the 
general  habit  of  mind  which  it  has  fostered 
and  cultivated.  It  has  not  led  to  many 
great  discoveries  which  can  be  set  apart 
from  the  general  run  of  facts  previously 
known;  but  it  has  led  to  changes  in  the 
methods  of  judgment  which  enable  us  to 
understand  and  use  all  historical  facts  in 
a  more  objective  way. 

A  few  years  ago,  when  Dr.  Jowett  was 

137 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

master  of  Balliol,  there  was  a  discussion 
concerning  two  men  who  had  attained  high 
position  at  an  early  age.  One  of  them  had 
become  a  bishop,  the  other  a  judge ;  and 
the  conversation  turned  on  the  respective 
merits  of  the  two  careers.  One  of  the  dons 
said:  "I  prefer  the  bishop.  The  judge  can 
only  say,  'You  be  hanged' ;  the  bishop  can 
say,  'You  be  damned.'  "  "Yes,"  said  Dr. 
Jowett,  sententiously,  "but  when  the  judge 
says,  'You  be  hanged,'  you  are  hanged^ 
The  influence  of  Charles  Darwin  on  his- 
torical and  political  thought  may  be 
summed  up  by  saying  that  he  has  made  our 
historians  cease  to  aspire  to  be  bishops 
and  content  themselves  with  the  more 
modest  but  also  more  effective  position  of 
judges.  For  broad  principles  of  judgment 
which  they  could  not  apply  effectively  they 
have  substituted  narrower  but  clearer  ones 
whose  application  can  be  made  evident  to 
their  fellow  men. 

138 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

I  have  spoken  of  this  attitude  of  mind 
as  having  been  foreshadowed  in  the  works 
of  Edmund  Burke.  To  him,  as  to  the 
modern  thinker,  human  history  was  the 
record  of  a  process  of  ehmlnation  and  sur- 
vival. To  him  poHtlcal  institutions  and 
poHtlcal  ideas  had  grown  up  as  a  means 
of  preserving  the  race  that  held  them. 
And  to  him  also  it  was  unwarrantable  to 
attempt  to  tear  down  on  a  priori  grounds 
beliefs  and  methods  that  had  preserved 
the  race  that  held  them,  unless  you  were 
able  to  substitute  something  practically 
better  In  their  place.  A  thing  did  not 
seem  to  him  correct  which  was  logically 
good  and  practically  bad.  He  suspected 
a  defect  in  the  logic.  Was  he  right  or 
wrong?  In  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth 
century  the  majority  of  men  would  have 
said  that  he  was  from  a  theoretical  stand- 
point wrong.  They  admired  his  insight 
into  the  political  conditions  of  his  day,  but 

139 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

they  would  have  none  of  his  theories. 
Today  the  world  feels  a  little  less  sure 
about  some  of  his  individual  judgments 
than  it  did  at  the  time  when  they  were 
uttered;  but  as  a  matter  of  theory  it  has 
accepted  his  method  as  a  sound  one.  It  is 
in  general  prepared  to  make  survival  a 
test  of  right. 

This  is  Darwin's  contribution  to  politi- 
cal science;  and  the  completeness  with 
which  this  contribution  is  accepted  is  shown 
by  the  sudden  cessation  of  public  interest 
in  books  which  do  not  apply  or  accept  that 
test.  Students  of  politics  no  longer  read 
either  Hegel  or  Comte.  Buckle's  History 
of^  Civilization,  which  in  the  years  imme- 
diately following  its  appearance  had  a 
greater  success  than  Darwin's  Origin  of 
Species,  is  now  known  only  to  a  few  spe- 
cialists in  English  literature.  Mill's  Prin- 
ciples of  Political  Economy  is  valued  for 
its  contributions  to  the  theory  of  banking; 

140 


INFLUENCE  OF  DARWIN 

but  as  a  work  of  political  philosophy  it  has 
lost  the  place  which  its  author,  modest 
man  though  he  was,  confidently  claimed 
for  it. 

We  can  get  a  curious  idea  of  the  kind  of 
change  which  has  taken  place  by  compar- 
ing two  works  which  are  closely  akin,  by 
two  men  who  were  closely  associated — 
Mill  on  Liberty  and  Morley  on  Com- 
promise. The  two  writers  deal  with 
nearly  the  same  topic.  They  approach  it 
with  nearly  the  same  prepossessions.  They 
arrive  at  almost  exactly  the  same  practical 
conclusions.  Yet  Morley  is  read  today, 
and  Mill,  speaking  broadly,  is  not.  Why? 
Because  Mill  is  constantly  referring  things 
to  a  subjective  standard,  and  Morley  to  an 
objective  one.  Mill's  whole  argument  is 
essentially  an  argumentum  ad  hominem, 
even  when  It  takes  the  form  of  an  appeal 
to  experience;  Morley's  an  appeal  to  expe- 

141 


INFLUENCES  IN  MODERN  THOUGHT 

rience,  even  when  it  takes  the  form  of  an 
argnmentum  ad  hominem. 

We  may  not  be  any  more  correct  In  our 
political  reasoning  than  our  fathers.  I 
dare  say  that  when  the  world  contrasts  the 
political  philosophy  of  today  with  that  of 
a  generation  or  two  ago  It  will  reprove  us 
for  our  crude  judgments  and  for  the 
irreverence  with  which  we  have  cast  aside 
work  that  was  better  than  our  own  because 
it  did  not  reach  Its  results  by  our  methods. 
But  we  are  at  least  trying  as  no  previous 
generation  has  tried  to  get  objective  stand- 
ards on  which  different  men  and  different 
ages  can  agree;  and  for  this  effort,  and 
for  whatever  measure  of  success  it  has 
attained,  we  may  thank  Charles  Darwin. 


142 


INDEX 


Annunzio,  Gabriele  d'  99,  100 

Aristotle,  theory  of  evolution 123 

Armies,  standing 60,  61 

Ashley,  W.  J 135 

Bagehot,    Walter    32,  133-135 

Bentham,   Jeremy    47,  48 

Bergson,    Henri    69 

Bichat,  M.  F.  X 26 

Biology,   development  of    25-27 

Bismarck     57-60 

Blake,  William   82-84 

Browning,  Robert,  90-97;  contrasted  with  William 

Blake,  92,  93  ;  with  Bernard  Shaw,  93,  94. 
Burke,  Edmund,  139;  on  prejudice,  75,  76. 

Carlyle,  Thomas    64,  123,  124 

Cell  theory 25-27 

Civilization,  ethical  character  of   33 

Clifford,  W.  K 132,  133 

Code  Napoleon    44,  45 

Common   sense   philosophy    16 

Comte,  Auguste    22,  34,  35 

Conservation  of  energy   23-25 

Copernicus   37 

Creeds,  3;  history  of,  116,  117. 

Darwin,  Charles,  28-39;   influence  of,  121-142. 

Darwinism  and  theism   36 

Dunoyer,  Charles 11 

Economics  and  Darwinian  theory  133-138 

Education,  true  meaning  of 1-3 

Energy,  conservation  of   23-25 

143 


INDEX 

Equality  in  French  Revolution   41-42 

Equality,  workings  of    43-46 

Ethics  as  affected  by  Darwinian  theory 129-133 

Evolution,    distinguished    from    natural    selection, 

28;  historical,  122,  123. 

Franklin,   Benjamin    20 

Fraternity  in  French  Revolution    42,  43 

Fraternity,  sentiment  of   46,  47 

Gamaliel,    philosophy   of    70 

Goethe  85-87 

Hegel     54,  123 

Henley,  W.  E 80,  82 

Historical  school  of  economics 135,  136 

Holy  Alliance   46,  47 

Huxley  and  the  Christian  church   4 

Ibsen,  Henrik   103 

Individualism  in  morals   62-64 

Individualism,  rise  of,  47-53;  decline  of,  53-61. 

Innate  ideas 114-116 

Instinct    73,  74 

Institutions,  early  history  of 126,  127 

James,   William    69,  73,  118,  119 

Jowett,  J.  H 137,  138 

Kipling,   Rudyard    105,  106,  108-112 

Lassalle,  Ferdinand 58 

Liberty  of  thought  in  Europe  15 

Liberty  in  French  Revolution,  40,  41 ;  French  and 

English  contrasted,  53,  54;   theory  of,  64,  65. 

Loria,  A 67 

Macaulay    12,  13 

Malthus,  T.  R 124-127 

xMarx,  Karl   55,  56,  58 

Mill,  John  Stuart,  14,  65,  123,  124,  141;   strength 

and  weakness  of,  127,  128. 
Militarism    60-62 

144 


INDEX 

Morley,    John,    65;    tolerance,    basis    of,    65;    in 

modern  literature,  106-112,  141. 

Mysticism     78 

Napoleon  on  equality   45,  46 

Napoleonic  code   44,  45 

National  unity  56,  57 

Nationalism     58-62 

Natural   selection,   28-36;   in   human  history,    124- 

130;  in  modern  literature,  98,  99;  in  politics, 

31,  32;  in  ethics,  32-34;  versus  special  creation, 

121,  122. 

Newman,  J.  H 89,  90 

Nietzsche,    Friedrich     66-68,  72,  87 

Over-specialization    2 

Philosophy,  meaning  of,  113-117;  relations  to  logic 

and  psychology,  118-120. 

Physiology  contrasted  with  morphology   27 

Plutarch    9 

Political  economy  and  Darwinian  theory 133-138 

Political  thought,  successive  stages  40 

Population,  Malthus's  principle  of 124,  127 

Pragmatism    69-74 

Prejudice,  114-117;  Burke  on,  75,  76. 

Property  right,  theory  of   136,   137 

Protective  tariffs  59-60 

Rational    egoism    63 

Reasoning,  tentative  character  of  73,  74 

Religious  feeling,  changes  in   77-82 

Revolution,   French,   effect  on   English   poetry,   88, 

89;  ideals  of,  40-43. 

Revolution  of  1848    56 

Rousseau     84,  85 

Rumf ord   23 

Ruskin,  John 89,  90 

Schiller    85,  87 

145 


INDEX 

Schwann,  Theodor 26 

Science,   modern,  development  of   18-34 

Scott,   Walter    88 

Shaw,   Bernard    84,  93,  94,  102-104 

Silliman,  Benjamin 13,  14 

Socialism,   origin   of   name,   54;    early  history  of, 

54-56. 

Specialized  study  2 

Spencer,  Herbert,  7,  8,  71,  72,  118,  119;  fallacies  of, 

131,  132. 

Storm  and  stress,  period  of 85,  86 

Tariffs,  protective , 59,  60 

Tennyson     79-81,  82 

Theism  and  Darwinism 36 

Thermodynamics  24,  25 

Types,    development   of,    125-127;    origin   of,    121, 

122;  selection  of,  29,  30. 

Wagner,  Adolph    135-137 

Wallace,  Alfred  Russell   28 

Wolff,    Caspar    26 

Wordsworth,  William    88 

Young  Hegelians   90 

Zola,  Emile 100,  101 


146 


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A  A      000188  891    6 


